The cultural scene fears bureaucracy more than Meloni

The concert was fantastic. The audience is in high spirits, doesn’t want to go home yet, and clamors for more encores. Alone, the curtain no longer goes up, nothing can be done, not even for the artists on the stage. It’s over at 11 p.m., definitely, everyone has to be outside, the union demands it, there are no exceptions. The applause dies down, the enthusiasm of the many foreign visitors gives way to their astonishment at the inflexibility of the house. And that in Italy?

Anyone who talks to artists and goes to concerts, exhibitions, opera or theater performances will sooner or later encounter a formalism and rigid regimentation that one would not expect from a country that is otherwise extremely flexible in many respects.

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Italy, it seems, is not a country where culture is thriving at the moment. The pandemic has also left its mark. Several theaters have closed in Rome. One of the traditional houses, the Teatro Eliseo, on whose stage greats like Anna Magnani and Vittorio Gassmann have played, is online advertised for sale. It is available for 24 million euros.

The country has had a new government for a month, led by Giorgia Meloni, head of the Fratelli d’Italia, which emerged from the post-fascist movement. Cultural policy hardly played a role in the election campaign, neither left nor right-wing parties wanted to distinguish themselves in this area. The cultural nation has other problems.

The fact that cultural policy has recently made headlines has to do with personnel decisions. Giorgia Meloni surprisingly appointed the TV journalist and non-fiction author Gennaro Sangiuliano as the new Minister of Culture. He was most recently director of the news program TG2 of the state media company RAI. Like Meloni, he experienced his political initiation in the youth movement Fronte della Gioventù of the post-fascist Movimento Sociale. He later emerged as a journalist, TV special reporter and author of popular biographies on Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Vladimir Putin.

Many had expected Meloni to nominate a conservative intellectual as minister, such as Marcello Pera, a well-known philosopher of science and university lecturer who was one of the right-wing candidates in the presidential turmoil last January.

Compared to him, Sangiuliano seems more of a lightweight. However, his departure from RAI gives the right-wing new leeway in filling important posts in television – which may be the underlying reason for his appointment.

One of the first statements made by the Neapolitan as Minister of Culture concerned the opening hours of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Sangiuliano complained that the museum was open on the Monday before All Saints’ Day remained closed. In a letter to the German museum director Eike Schmidt, he described this fact as “damaging the image of the Uffizi and the entire system of national museums”. Observers assessed the advance of the new man at the head of the Ministry of Culture as an expression of unnecessary micromanagement and strange prioritization.

A narcissist of quite a talent

What Sangiuliano doesn’t have enough of, his new Undersecretary of State Vittorio Sgarbi has a lot of: knowledge of art and cultural history. In his case, however, they are associated with an exaggerated self-confidence and just as much criticism and a willingness to fight. Sgarbi, made famous by Berlusconi television, lets it go in front of running cameras like to get into arguments and even fights, which ensures good ratings.

The satirist Massimo Gramellini recently described him in the Corriere della Sera as an “anarcho-narcissist of considerable culture, considerable talent and very little self-control”. designated – he was sympathetic, “but in the kind of sympathy I have for powerful, irritable dogs when I see them on a leash and at a safe distance”.

He recently attracted attention in Switzerland for spending days insulting the Ticino authorities on his social media channels. He was fined for illegally driving his company car with the lights flashing on the motorway between Locarno and Chiasso.

This is how the head of the Italian Ministry of Culture presents itself: telegenic and quick-tempered. Does that have to be bad for the culture?

Eike Schmidt, the director of the Uffizi, who was reprimanded by Sangiuliano, interprets the appointment as follows: “Perhaps Meloni wanted to disrupt the structures first.” This would not be undesirable for Schmidt. Because he, like all of the interlocutors in unison, struggles with the entrenched bureaucratic structures of the cultural sector.

reforms from the right

According to Schmidt, history shows that well-known reforms in the Italian cultural sector were usually initiated by ministers from the right-wing camp. For example, the partial autonomy introduced by the center-left in 2014 for certain museums, such as the Uffizi, which was based on a plan by conservative minister Antonio Paolucci in 1996.

Florence can now make free decisions in economic, organizational and scientific-artistic terms – a fact that, according to Schmidt, has also contributed to the fact that the Uffizi Gallery is now managed entrepreneurially and is self-financing. Only in terms of personnel law is the world-famous museum still dependent on a drip from the Ministry of Culture in Rome: It is practically impossible to let go of employees who do not perform as required.

“Further decentralization and even more autonomy would be important,” says Schmidt, who has now gone on the offensive when it comes to opening times and is convinced that the conflict with Sangiuliano in this regard has been resolved: on the Mondays after Christmas and New Year, the Florentine Museum is open for the open to the public.

As a German, does he fear being removed from the top of the Uffizi Gallery by the right-wing government? After all, the Palazzo Chigi is completely dedicated to “patria”. We’ll see, says the director calmly.

When Sangiuliano’s social-democratic predecessor, Dario Franceschini, correctly opened the vacancy notice for the important managerial posts to foreigners in 2015, the protest came primarily from the Old Left corner. Sangiuliano himself has not yet commented on this. Schmidt is relaxed about the subject – especially since, as an internationally sought-after museum director, he hardly has to worry about being without a job.

In general, cultural policy in Italy is much less oriented towards the left-right pattern than north of the Alps. In Rome, artistic circles mourn the brief period in which the Cinque Stelle were in power – the government that everyone agreed left behind a catastrophic political legacy. But in the field of culture, in Luca Bergamo, she had a man who made many things possible and brought them together and who led the free art scene to a brief flowering, like Cesare Pietroiusti, one of the well-known contemporary Italian artistssays.

restorative phase

Pietroiusti himself was involved during this time as president of the special agency “PalaExpo”, which, on behalf of the city of Rome, used the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, the Macro (museum for contemporary art) and the exhibition rooms in the former slaughterhouse in the Testaccio district. The three sites became highly regarded places of exchange across disciplines, a platform for dialogue between art and science.

Under the city government of social democrat Roberto Gualtieri, who has been in office for a good year, the momentum seems to have evaporated and bureaucracy has regained the upper hand. “The administrative apparatus in Rome is very inefficient,” says Pietroiusti, “there is an unimaginable accumulation of constraints, obstacles, delays, permits, pointless administrative costs.” As a result, Rome cannot exploit its huge potential.

Italy, most observers agree, is in a culturally restorative phase, regardless of the prevailing political color. There is little willingness to take risks, what is popular and already successful is encouraged, the focus of education is on the preservation of cultural heritage and hardly on creation and innovation. Private patrons shy away from working with the state because it acts far too bureaucratically. The number of forms and safeguards is legion. Anyone who wants to make a difference here needs a lot of assertiveness and the courage to fight against sinecures.