1 Blockmodels

Professionals can be rewarded in different ways. The most common type of reward is provided by the market, that is, by successfully selling one’s products or services to consumers. In professional fields dealing with the production of knowledge, art, et cetera, market success is usually just one type of reward for professionals and not necessarily the most important one. Especially recognition by peers and financing by the government is important here. Because governments tend to use several schemes for allocating money to a particular sector, we usually deal with systems of rewards. This paper visualizes and examines the system of rewards for visual artists, installed by the Dutch national government in the period 1984-2005. Because this system includes several subsidy schemes involving different stakeholders in the allocation of subsidies – consumers, institutional experts and artists themselves – we expect it to be segmented, viz., different types of schemes will favour different types of art and artists as hypothesized by Diana Crane (‘Reward systems in art, science, and religion.’ American Behavioral Scientist, 19 (1976), 719-734). In addition, I expect that the Matthew Effect, introduced by Robert K. Merton (Science 159 (1968) 5, 56-63) will be operative, which predicts a concentration of rewards among a small group of artists, because notably the institutional experts and artists involved in the allocation of subsidies will take previous awards of subsidies as a sign of artistic quality.