Between self-referentiality and empty rhetoric: the MiBACT budget made in Franceschini

In the age of Power Point politics, it is entirely to be expected that a minister of the republic, now in his third year in office, instead of asking himself what has not worked in that time and what can be improved, will waste and waste time having PDF presentations compiled to draw up his own balance sheet of his activities. Normal administration for an exponent of a government that has accustomed us to slide talk rather than effective action (and of which the current one represents nothing more than the continuation, hidden behind a more serious mask). It so happens that, on the third anniversary of his inauguration at the Collegio Romano, Minister of Cultural Heritage Dario Franceschini releases a document on the Ministry’s website, the title of which is already a whole program: Culture and Tourism. Three years of government. “Culture and tourism. Not a universalistic ”culture and citizenship,“ a pragmatic ”culture and civic sense,“ a dreamy ”culture and freedom": titles that would still have been the result of declamatory emphasis, but would have made a completely different impression. No: culture, for Franceschini, is the natural handmaiden of tourism.

Culture and tourism. Three years of government

But this is certainly not the main problem with Franceschini’s document. If the wizards were limited solely to the title, we would have something to rejoice about. “Culture and Tourism. Three years of government,” unfortunately, conceals a report dense with self-referentiality, empty Renzian-style rhetoric, partial budgets from which transpires a fake reality made up of fake revolutions, half-truths, due actions passed off as extraordinary results, all stuffed with the usual, pathetic, stale clichés of Italy being a place of “intertwining beauty, art, landscape and creativity,” of “culture being the vehicle of Made in Italy,” of art “attracting foreign investment.” There is little to add: one only has to browse through the PDF even distractedly to realize that one is faced with a document with the flavor of party propaganda. And that the document resembles more an electoral poster than a true balance sheet is evident from the moment Franceschini lashes out at the “anachronistic vision that pitted protection and enhancement against each other”: a vision that never actually existed, but was well thought out to be attributed to opponents of the government line (the latter responsible, if anything, for exacerbating that opposition).

The sixty-nine pages that make up the document are a continuous succession of pompous claims of achievements that seem bombastic only to those who have no knowledge of the history of the Italian cultural heritage over the past three years. It begins with the billion euros for culture allocated by CIPE to the Ministry: a billion that, however, will be allocated to a limited number of sites (thirty-three in all), while the others will have to continue to scramble with the (few) resources that the Ministry allocates to protection. Yes, of course: the Ministry’s budget is back above the 2.1 billion euro threshold, marking areversal from previous governments, all of which were characterized by a common propensity to cut resources allocated to cultural heritage, but in his document Franceschini omits to say that the Ministry’s budget will presumably go back down in 2017 and 2018. The budget estimate for the three-year period 2016-2018, which can be safely downloaded from the MiBACT website, records yes 2,128,366,723 euros for 2016, but it marks 1,754,738,237 for 2017 and 1,654,456,618 for 2018: it could return, in practice, to the levels of the Monti government. Being a provisional budget, it is likely that the figures will then be revised upward (and Franceschini already announces that the 2.1 billion for 2016 has “been confirmed” for 2017 as well), but as we wait for an official statement that is not Franceschini’s three-year budget, some doubt is warranted.

Franceschini then boasts as a success the competition for 500 new officials in the Ministry, in reality a paltry palliative that will barely be enough to cover turnover, while superintendencies, museums, archives and libraries will continue to work in understaffed situations. Just in the February issue of Art and Dossier, an article by Fabio Isman effectively illustrated the situation of the National Galleries of Palazzo Barberini and Palazzo Corsini: forty custodians for the two museums, divided over forty-four rooms (thirty-six at Palazzo Barberini, eight at Palazzo Corsini), of whom four would not be available, however, and the remaining thirty-six are insufficient to guarantee the continuous opening of all the rooms of the two galleries (the problems of Palazzo Barberini, in particular, are perennial: it is now almost a privilege to be able to visit it entirely). Speaking of museums: Franceschini presents as a revolution the acquired autonomy on the part of some 30 institutes and the organization of the remainder into regional museum poles. If there has been a revolution, it has been in the negative: museums, having severed their ties with their superintendencies, have been disconnected from their territories, and autonomy has led, for the time being, to questionable reorganizations (the example of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome is particularly significant), to scripted initiatives (such as the bachelor party in the courtyard of Palazzo Pitti or the loan of thirteen works from the Galleria Borghese to the TEFAF in Maastricht) and, in general, to very little action, because the problems that the new “super-directors” are facing are the same as ever. And we do not see drastic changes from previous managements. Libraries and archives, on the other hand, are simply left to their own devices.

And if it must be acknowledged that theArt Bonus was one of the most interesting gimmicks of the current minister, the same cannot be said of the free Sundays, which Franceschini claims as a success that has helped “increase museum attendance,” but which in reality has turned them into alternatives to village festivals, assailed as they are by crowds eager for that same “beauty” touted by the minister and who evidently, having to choose between the “cultural stroll” to the Uffizi and the stroll to the chestnut festival, have granted preference to the first option. And what about theamalgamation of superintendencies according to the nefarious logic of the “holistic view” instead? Nothing, except that it has actually produced only great confusion: merged competencies, fewer offices, depowered superintendents and officials. And we have discussed these problems extensively in these pages.

I prefer to stop here and leave it to the reader to evaluate the rest of the Franceschini manifesto. If you want to get an idea, there are even links to Franceschini’s individual tweets. All this, of course, without the slightest hint of self-criticism: I am not saying that negative assessments from the minister were to be expected as well. That would have been rather naive. But at least a few phrases, such as “we know that there can be improvement and we will work to solve the problems that still exist,” or “we will try to ensure that we are even more decisive than we have been in our work up to this point,” and instead, nothing. It is the triumph ofself-aggrandizement. And to me, sorry, a sense of nausea arose.

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