How useless is the competition for directors of the new state museums?

Let’s start with a small premise: as is well known, soon twenty museums hitherto dependent on the Ministry of Culture and linked to their superintendencies will become autonomous. This is what was envisaged by the MiBACT reform devised last year by the Renzi government (you may recall that we have talked about it in several in-depth articles). The reform envisaged that for these twenty museums (we will mention a few: the Uffizi, the Galleria Estense in Modena, the Pinacoteca di Brera, the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, and the Galleria Borghese in Rome) there would be a competition at the end of which each museum would have a new director, and already when the first drafts of the reform came out we wondered why we should hold a competition that would make a “reset” of the directors of the twenty museums, when people of undoubted ability were already at their helm. Now that the list of candidates admitted to the orals has appeared on the ministry website (as if we were back in school), the doubts have not only remained, but probably increased.

Yes, there are many questions that come to mind after reading this list. But let us try to proceed with a minimum of order. Striking, meanwhile, is the fact that there are aspiring directors who have applied for a disproportionate number of museums: for example, Martina Bagnoli, an expert on medieval art currently on staff at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, has applied for as many as 12 museums. The question arises: while knowing (it goes without saying) the preparation and seriousness of all the applicants (on this, no argument), how can the committee judge a candidate who has applied for more than half of the museums? They are all institutes that have very different histories, operate in far different contexts and, above all, have to deal with problems whose nature is never the same: think of the Galleria Estense that has recently reopened its doors and therefore has to reorganize its activities as best it can, or a Palazzo Ducale in Mantua still struggling with the aftermath of the 2012 earthquake, or the Uffizi that has to deal with mass tourism on a daily basis. Do those running for ten museums have the capacity to deal with all the problems of all the museums for which they have applied?

Let us come to the second point: from the rankings, it seems that the selection committee suffers from an embarrassing foreignophilia: the candidates with the highest scores are almost always those with international experience. But only a provincial mindset can think that having accumulated years of work abroad can be an advantage over having an in-depth knowledge of the museum for which one is applying. Let us take the example of the Uffizi: we have the utmost and most heartfelt respect for Stefano Carboni, but frankly it seems bordering on the ridiculous that a specialist in Islamic art (moreover, running for five museums) should get a higher ranking than Antonio Natali, who besides being a scholar of undoubted value and a refined intellectual, is probably also the person who knows the Uffizi Gallery best in the world. His competitor has worked at the Metropolitan in New York and directs the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth, all right: but is that enough to outrank one of Italy’s best directors, who has been able to lead the Uffizi with great professionalism for the past nine years, and whom we would like to see remain in his post?

The Borghese Gallery in Rome

And again, third question: why do the candidates, who are almost all world-renowned scholars and have long experience in museum management, have to go through interviews as if they were newly hired interns? What are they supposed to prove? Given the names of the committee members, it is highly likely that the examiners have less experience than the candidates. In fact. that’s for sure, since three out of five members are not even cultural heritage specialists. And, to be honest again, it is very laughable that among the competencies being evaluated is “knowledge of the Italian cultural heritage”: it would have been nice to see the committee at work in scoring on “knowledge of the Italian cultural heritage” to scholars located at the planetary top in cultural heritage knowledge.

Finally, the most ridiculous but also the most disturbing fact: after the commission has chosen a trio of suitable candidates for each of the twenty museums, the appointment of the new director will be up to Minister Dario Franceschini and the director general of the ministry’s museums sector, architect Ugo Soragni. The appointment will be made “on the basis of the analysis conducted by the commission and the final judgment made by it.” And one can only hope that common sense will prevail in the end. But the question is, why are five experts being called upon to judge the candidates if it will then be up to Franceschini and Soragni to make the appointment? Just to provide a basis on which to make assessments? Then why not have the names of the new directors come out of the same committee? Most importantly: why not leave everything as it used to be, when museum directors were appointed by their superintendencies? Oh, yeah: the reform actually took away several powers from the superintendencies, and some of them were literally dismembered. But this was not what the ministry needed. And if it is true that a good day dawns, perhaps it will not be a good day, given that one of the first concrete products of the reform is precisely this hilarious (and useless) competition that has taken some of the world’s best professionals back in time, to the days of high school exams. Complete with a timetable for the orals.

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