In short, why are museums and libraries closing? Some elements of evaluation

The total shutdown of culture (exhibitions and museums, but also archives and libraries) imposed by the government with the dpcm of November 3 and the substantial resignation with which those working in the field, with few exceptions, have greeted the news (quite differently from the cinema and theater workers, who immediately launched appeals upon appeals and made a lot of noise), need some reflections to try to better focus on the problem. The closure due to Covid-19 of the places identified by Article 101 of the Cultural Heritage Code (museums, libraries, archives, archaeological areas and parks, monumental complexes), established for the entire national territory regardless of the risk profile assigned by the Ministry of Health to individual territories, was motivated basically with two reasons: the containment of mobility and the reduction of opportunities for meeting, socializing, and gathering. I will run the risk of uttering a statement unwelcome to many colleagues and to so much of the arts and culture public, but the reasons given by the government are in themselves very reasonable. Not least because the epidemiological situation, we are told by scientists as well as hospital directors and workers, is becoming more and more critical every day, and it is therefore necessary to implement even drastic measures.

Any measure that takes away opportunities for the public to meet or to crowd means of transportation is, in this sense, a blow dealt to the coronavirus, and this would be true even if that the government had made the decision to close museums and libraries in the absence of sound scientific data proving that museums and libraries are places where the contagion is spread. Because after all, it also has to be said that museums, libraries and places of culture in general, given their low attendance, given the discipline of their audiences, given the nature of the activities that take place there, are among the safest sites in existence. So it is true: it is virtually impossible to contract Covid in a museum, given that, moreover, museums have worked commendably hard to ensure maximum compliance with all the safety measures prescribed by health authorities. But the problem is actually not the museum: the problem is, for example, the busload of retirees who, say, travel from Bologna to Padua to see an exhibition or a museum and then, after the visit is over, perhaps meet at a restaurant for a leisurely lunch. It is then virtually impossible to become infected in the library, but to physically travel to the library a student may need to board a transport and contribute to its crowding. So, at least in theory, closing cultural venues to limit mobility and sociability makes sense.

However, the whole context also needs to be assessed: museums and libraries close, but churches remain open (and even in red zones religious services will continue to be held), and bars and restaurants also remain open in yellow zones. It is true that churches are better distributed than museums, and in Italy every tiniest hamlet in the most remote municipality has its own house of worship (a circumstance that spontaneously reduces the mobility of the faithful), but it is also true that churches, especially for people in the most at-risk age groups, also offer moments of sociability. What about bars, on the other hand? The aperitif, a fundamental pillar of Italians’ social life, for many seems to be an indispensable moment even in the midst of a health crisis such as the one we are going through, and patience if it has to be brought forward to snack time because the government has imposed the closing of bars at 6 p.m. Of course, this is not a polemic against churches or bars: it is simply an example to point out that if churches and bars remain open, then the indiscriminate closure of all cultural venues to limit mobility begins to lose almost all its elements of rationality. True, it is still a matter of people being taken out of circulation, but if the rationale is to reduce mobility and sociability, then there are places that remain open that move far more people than are displaced by cultural venues. Reasoning the other way around would not have made Italy an isolated case in Europe: in Catalonia, for example, restaurants and bars are closed, but museums are open (as in all of Spain, one of the few countries that, during the second wave, chose not to close cultural venues, while other activities close on the basis of territorial risk as in Italy, while for museums there was no closure).

Then, given the situation, the Italian picture should perhaps include other elements for evaluation. For example, one might wonder whether the government has not assessed that the opening of museums in a scenario such as the one we are experiencing represents, for the coffers of public bodies, an unsustainable increase in operating costs. Similarly, one might wonder how much the outsourcing of services has affected the closures: in a great many museums, a large part of the staff in charge of ticketing, reception, bookshops, and guided tours is not employed by the public administration but by private companies that have obtained certain services under concession. These staff are often precarious and hired on fixed-term contracts, and probably, at a time when museum attendance is at its lowest, it may be more economically viable in some places to keep them closed by not renewing their contracts than to open their doors to the public. It is not strange that the opening of a museum could be considered uneconomical: we all still remember the example of the civic museums in Florence, which did not reopen immediately last May 18 (the date set for reopening after the March-April confinement) because, by the city administration’s own admission, it would have been too expensive. Still, as of July 18, three out of 10 state museums were still closed. Nor is it strange that in eight months the situation is back to square one: it would be necessary to revise the basic mechanisms of the system, and to achieve such a goal eight months is really too short a time frame, especially in the midst of a pandemic. If anything, it is strange that in all these months the problem has not been adequately discussed.

The same goes for libraries: it is worth quoting the words of Rosa Maiello, national president of the Italian Library Association, who at the confinement last March was among the few to assess the issue from this perspective. Maiello wrote that the closures will weigh on the shoulders of workers “given that the outsourcing of services is now used to contain the outcomes of the lack of turnover when not, irresponsibly with respect to market conditioning, for the sole purpose of producing savings for slow, to the point that the library systems of some territories, one example for all Sardinia, are sustained for the most part on the work of outsourced staff.” And again, “many commissioning administrations have made no attempt to check the feasibility of rescheduling service hours or rescheduling projects, even in smart working mode. All this in the presence of service contracts that are demanding in terms of the number of employees and the services required (but not infrequently laughable in terms of the tender amounts), with clauses that bind payment to theffective performance of the service hours stipulated in the contract itself, or do not contemplate periods of vacation time with costs borne by the contracting authority.” To these problems, the government, in March, responded with the temporary layoff fund.

At the moment, the whole culture is in a situation that is perfectly superimposed on the one that occurred in March. And perhaps there is no single reason for the closure of museums. Asking the government to reopen museums, libraries, cinemas, and theaters will do no good: indeed, we are likely to face extended closures in December if the epidemiological situation does not improve. Then perhaps, having reached this point, instead of continuing to argue about how much safer museums, libraries and cinemas are than other places (a given by now), it will be time to start a broader and even more important discussion. In March we opened it on the backwardness of our museums with respect to digital, and appreciable progress has been made in recent months. Now merely receiving the news that culture closes in order to reduce mobility and sociality is not enough: perhaps, it is the case to reason about the dynamics that regulate the opening of our cultural places, the fragility of these mechanisms, their sustainability, the possibility of thinking about alternative models of development both for our cultural places and for our cities: it is a discussion that is becoming more and more urgent every day.

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