Salvatore Settis speaks: "those who close museums consider human beings as mere bodies"

The draconian decision to keep museums closed (at least until January 15), regardless of the risk zones, makes it urgent to redefine the meaning and purposes of museums, with the necessary assimilation of a function that has long been recognized by medicine, that is, that cultural heritage contributes to improving the well-being of individuals, including the psycho-physical aspect, which is particularly important in times of pandemic. This is the only way to overcome the legal contradiction established by the PDCs, according to which museums would hinder the “protection of public safety” that the state must guarantee (Art. 117), even at the cost of sacrificing constitutionally guaranteed essential goods (Art. 9). This is the conclusion we have arrived at thanks to the in-depth reflections not only on legal matters, but also on the ideal and values level, which constitutionalist Enrico Grosso shared with us in the interview last Dec. 1. Just two days later Icom announced a webinar on December 10 in which the discussion will be reopened, after the organization’s general assembly in September 2019 in Kyoto decided to postpone it to give the world museum community another year to compare notes.

We, meanwhile, have decided to reopen this discussion with Salvatore Settis, professor emeritus at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, which he directed from 1999 to 2010. And we do so precisely from the conclusions we came to that he found “wise.”

Not only of closures, but also of controversial openings we spoke with the distinguished professor. We also asked him, in fact, to comment on a decree signed on November 30 by the Councilor for Cultural Heritage and Sicilian Identity Alberto Samonà (League), on the concession for the use of cultural assets belonging to the state property and heritage of the Sicilian Region in storage in the warehouses of its peripheral institutes, and renamed “Catania Charter,” in homage to its creator, the superintendent of cultural heritage of Catania, Rosalba Panvini.

Salvatore Settis. Ph. Credit Saso Pippia - Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria.

MS. Professor, the time is ripe: it is precisely after the experience of the global health emergency that the debate, postponed after Kyoto, should receive renewed impetus toward a new definition of a museum. What is it for you?

SS. I do not want to get into the labyrinth of the very broad discussion on the definition of museums that does not agree among specialists internationally. I say what museums are (or are not) according to my point of view, for the Italian Constitution and tradition. Museums are not a place where one collects works of art in order to peel off tickets, to lengthen the lines waiting to get in, or to please a sponsor. Museums are places where a cultural community can recognize itself. Citizens who go to Milan, Florence or Rome make community with those from Australia or China. We must not fall into the all-Italian trap of setting the problem from the formal point of view and not the content. The issue today is that we do not understand why you can go to a tobacco shop or supermarket and not to a museum. This is what I wrote in my open letter to President Conte in the Corriere, which never received a response. For what reason are five people in a museum room more contagious than the same five people in a grocery store of equal cubage and area? I would add that art galleries are, on the other hand, open, because they are commercial establishments. And, then, I would like to know precisely why art is contagious when it is not for sale and is no longer contagious when it is for sale. All this reflects a hierarchy of values that ethically and politically is detestable: the idea, that is, that art either produces revenue or it is not important. It is more important to sell cigarettes than to show paintings.

A measure that seems more incomprehensible because it is adopted throughout the country indiscriminately, regardless of risk zones, even in “yellow” regions.

Here, this is another important point. Let’s take the libraries. Some are open, like the one at the Scuola Normale in Pisa. With very limited numbers, about ten people a day can get in there by making reservations, while normally there are at least a hundred. So why is it that the opening of libraries is left to the arbitrariness or goodwill of the directors and, on the other hand, the opening of museums cannot be left to the responsibility of their directors?

You invited earlier not to put the question of what a museum is on a formal level. But if cultural goods and the museums that guard them were also legally recognized, as has been the case in medical literature for some time now, as useful instruments for improving the psycho-physical well-being of individuals, and thus in this sense useful instruments for participating in that “protection of public safety” that the state intends to guarantee even at the cost of sacrificing them, and thus not in conflict with this very protection, might this not be the key to overcoming the line of austerity taken by the government?

The conception that presides over the decision to keep museums closed considers human beings as mere bodies, as if there is no spiritual component. When the painter Lucian Freud, grandson of the psychoanalyst, said “I go to the National Gallery as one goes to the doctor” he meant just that: just as one goes to the doctor to come out in better physical health, so one goes to the museum to come out in better intellectual health. The thinking, the psyche, the feelings. It is not only in terms of GDP that one judges well-being. Years ago the Central Statistical Institute set up a commission, of which I was a member, that produced a document in which the beauty of the landscape and the preservation of historic centers were also used as indices of the spiritual well-being and intellectual well-being of citizens. Italy’s historical primacy in legislation for protection was being recognized. All this has been forgotten by the current government.

In His words the key word “well-being” returns. Precisely the promotion of “community well-being” is identified among the purposes of a museum in Icom Italy’s proposal to update the definition. The translation of this term in the English language (“wellbeing”), as noted by its president Tiziana Maffei, contains more nuance than the concept of well-being in the Italian word. “Wellbeing” means “the state of feeling healthy and happy”: a condition of health not divorced from happiness. Which is still something different from well-being.

This seems to me a very important point. The condition of happiness has a long history starting from Greek philosophy. In Greek it is called “eudaimonia,” which is the state of balance with the world around us. And already Aristotle understood very well that in the condition of “eudaimonia” human beings are not only happier, but being happier they are also more productive. This thought corresponds to a major elaboration in contemporary moral philosophy, particularly in America, which translates the Greek term as “flourishing,” to mean the condition of human “flourishing.” Flourishing is also related to productivity, and productivity is also economic. No civilization is productive without having flourishing at its core. The moments of tremendous flourishing in human history are also the moments of tremendous productivity. Just think of what Italy was also in terms of great economic productivity in the 15th and 16th centuries, when it taught the whole world what we now call the Renaissance.

Yet, it is precisely at a time of fragility generated by the climate related to the pandemic of uncertainties and semi-isolation or isolation, depending on the levels of restriction for different areas of the country, that we forget to ferry this great lesson from the past into the present. Even at the cost of sacrificing the enormous efforts made to adapt museums to anti-Covid measures. How could this have been (and still could be) done differently? It’s not just the museums. After thelockdownended last May, exhibition events designed with these measures in mind were inaugurated. That was not enough.

Apparently not. The exhibition I curated, The Torlonia Marbles, which opened on Oct. 12 in the presence of the President of the Republic, has a maximum number of people in the halls, reaching only two visitors in one. On the threshold of each hall is a custodian who prevents access if you exceed this number. Where is the problem? I cannot explain it except to a government blinded by economic priority. This lack of attention to culture is particularly serious in a country where it is a right enshrined in the Constitution.

Do you think, then, that as with libraries, some open others not, a more flexible discourse could have been made for exhibitions and museums as well? Green light only for those who are able to comply with the quota measures.

Of course one could have been more flexible. However, the choice was made to do it differently at a time when less money is being earned from ticketing. Instead, the opposite should be done at this time: all museums open free for everyone and the extra costs brought about by the contingency covered with the Recovery Fund. This is a proposal that I delivered in my letter to Conte, which received no response, even though taking care of the spiritual and intellectual well-being of 60 million Italians should be among the duties of the Prime Minister.

If on the one hand it closes, on the other hand it opens. We are still on national territory, but in a region, Sicily, with broad autonomy in the area of cultural heritage. And a primary legislative power that allows it to give birth to legislation that is not applied in the rest of the country. As in the case of the “Catania Charter,” by which it is intended to enhance the value of cultural goods “that are in storage in regional warehouses” “through display in public or private places open to the public.” What do you think?

Let’s first understand what is meant by valorization. Valorization in Italy, and therefore also in Sicily, which I understand is still part of Italy, is defined by Article 6 of the Cultural Heritage Code, which I helped write, as I then chaired the Commission for the drafting of the regulatory text. Moreover, under a Berlusconi government. Minister of Cultural Heritage was Rocco Buttiglione. And, therefore, Art. 6 says that enhancement means enhancement in a predominantly cultural sense, which does not exclude the economic fact, but introduces a priority. That said, those who understood valorization to mean the emptying of repositories, particularly museums, do not know what a repository is. This is one of the most deep-rooted legends that there are in such a provincial country as Italy, according to which of the things that are in repositories are useless, like certain attics at home where one throws what one does not know what to do with. These people have never seen what the deposits of the British Museum, the Metropolitan, the Louvre, the Getty Museum are. Each museum has vast deposits that are a kind of golden reserve of research that is to come. Those of the Louvre are so enormous that they have built a new modern building in northern France, a hundred kilometers from Paris, to which some 250,000 works will be transferred. There are works in the repositories that we do not yet know well. It is through research that we can make discoveries and decide to exhibit an object or work that has been there perhaps for fifty years. A very recent example: in the deposits of the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo a Mantegna was discovered two years ago; if it had been given to someone, albeit with the purpose of public enjoyment, for a fee, this extraordinary find would not have happened. It cannot be understood as valorization to lend a Mantegna to hang it in a hotel lobby.

There is also another issue. For the identification and arrangement in homogeneous lots of the huge patrimony in the deposits of the regional institutes, the decree provides that a delicate activity that requires specialized skills is also assigned to “university students in disciplines related to the conservation of cultural heritage working under a training internship regime,” evidently to fill, within the institutes themselves, the heavy shortages in personnel.

The Sicilian region is particularly active in inventing wretched measures that are then punctually taken up by other regions and even the state. There are at least two serious aspects to this decree: one is to recruit unpaid labor. It is the same rationale behind the so-called alternanza scuola-lavoro, instituted by Minister Gelmini, during the last Berlusconi government: you take students out of school, where they could learn something, to be put in jobs, unpaid, where sometimes they learn something, most of the time nothing. I find this outrageous. More serious still, if possible, on this scale of severity, is the decision to consciously trample on any idea of competence. To believe, that is, that in order to be able to evaluate an asset in a repository, to determine whether it is important or not, one can do without a practiced eye, such as a novice university student cannot have. To take a Sicilian example, a few years ago, in the deposits of the Salinas Museum in Palermo, Clemente Marconi, a professor at New York University, discovered pieces of the Selinunte metopes that had never been seen. If these pieces had been given on display to ten different individuals, no one would have been able to recognize them one by one and put them back together again. And this discovery, however, who made it? A first-rate archaeologist like Marconi.

What do you think can be done, instead, to enhance the heritage that lies in repositories? Even in those of smaller realities, not comparable with the examples he gave earlier, of the Met or the Louvre.

Anyone who works in museums knows that the organization of deposits has changed a great deal in the last twenty or thirty years. The repositories of the better museums are visitable, like the “study repositories” of the National Gallery. Museums rightly display a significant selection of their holdings, such that it is possible to arrange a visit to the collections that lasts two or three hours and from which one leaves satisfied, but a thought-out repository such as the one in London allows those already familiar with the permanent collections to “entertain” themselves with lesser-known works, not necessarily for study purposes. An approach that applies to all museums, not just the “big ones.”

There are, however, not only museum deposits. Can different considerations be made in the case of superintendency repositories?

Let us begin by saying that the foolish divorce between superintendencies and museums needs to be abolished. In this Sicily has sadly been in the vanguard and then, as I said before, copied by the state. Instead, museums should be, as they were before the Franceschini reform, within the superintendencies. There should not be duplication, as is the case, for example, in Pompeii and Herculaneum, where all the materials from the old excavations are on display or in the deposits of the National Museum in Naples, whereas since the archaeological parks of Pompeii and Herculaneum and the museum have been detached from the superintendency, the artifacts from the excavations no longer go to the Museum in Naples, but into deposits in Pompeii that are generating a new museum. I believe that the repositories of the excavated objects should be in the same place, either a historical museum like the one in Naples or in the same places that house the archaeological discoveries from the same site, and that these places should be called a museum and should be closely connected to the superintendency, without creating, as in fact is being created, rivalries. There are cases, such as that of the superintendency of Reggio Calabria, evicted from the museum and moved to an apartment building. The solution, in the end, is to return to the Italian system that has been experimented with for a century: there must be a territorial superintendency for each segment of territory, which sometimes can even coincide with an entire region, especially if it is small, think of Molise; sometimes it can be a single province, if it is very rich, like that of Florence; sometimes it can still be a group of provinces, as it used to be for Pisa and Livorno. And the museums that insist on that territory must be framed within it. The excavations produced by the Catania Superintendency should flow into the repositories of a museum that pertains to it. Creating these duplications, on the other hand, is contrary to any research strategy. If one wants to study Paestum, one cannot go and see the objects a little in Salerno, a little in the deposits of the Soprintendenza. Even today to study Pompeii it could happen that a statue is in Naples and the foot in Pompeii if it is discovered now. What logic presides over all this?

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