Ten years of Franceschini reform: a reform by halves

That Franceschini’s was a perfectible reform is known: “a reform by halves,” I would say. That it is not well-loved, also, it must be said; that for better or worse, then, it has shaken up the system, and that it has had some positive insights, few have noticed, and even fewer admitted (more out of petty parochialism than anything else).

Surely its greatest merit is that, over time, and in the long season that characterized the past management of the MIC, first MiBACT, then MiBAC, etc., it has always remained hinged on one perspective: wanting to make the national museum system first and foremost a contemporary and accomplished system, truly sustainable. And to some extent it has succeeded: if today we can consider the future of the museum system as all in all positive development, it is also due to that reform.

However, the good intentions have sometimes lacked lucid implementation: as, for example, with “Free Sundays at the Museum,” which, while they created (intended to create) a favorable accessibility opportunity to revitalize cultural consumption, today too often are interpreted tout court as THE solution to a more radical problem of attracting audiences, and not understood as part of a strategy (e.g. combined with a deregulation on opening hours, or a remodulation of ticketing implemented by a system of “cards/subscriptions”), thus ending up promoting and emphasizing only a strong rivalry between cultural institutions based on numbers and quantity, to the detriment of quality fruition, amplifying the conditions so that the -especially Italian- audiences of museums and archaeological parks become such (almost) only on free days, precisely, leaving little (or no) room for the other days of the month. I find something deeply distorted in this.

In any case, some right moves have been made, and it must be granted. Beginning with the recognition of the proper principle of valorization and its propaedeutic (and necessary) relationship between heritage protection and its management, to the idea of the autonomies of some particularly representative museum institutes, separated from the superintendencies, implemented with the idea of modernizing our degree national museums by making their profile more European. An intuition that even today, in nuce, runs on such good principles as: facilitating management subsidiarity of the heritage and the collections they guard, unbureaucratizing their organization, implementing and streamlining their proactive and decision-making capacity on communication and marketing interventions, but also on educational, scientific and research interventions, touching on exhibitions, loans, restorations, acquisitions, etc... , placing the specificities of individual institutions at the center of their management policies (as opposed to a generalist state centralization), thus, in fact, stemming the loss of competitiveness of Italy’s “cultural system” in the world.

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In this sense over time autonomies, have objectively changed a certain idea of the museum, and created opportunities for some institutions that in ten years have grown very much and well, attesting to prominent places on the European scene (think Pompeii or the Uffizi, above all). Unfortunately, the growth that has been increasingly looked to over these 10 years has been basically that of the economic efficiency of the institutes, and their ability to generate revenue given by the number of admissions. But is this really enough to identify the “success” (or otherwise) of a museum and an entire reform? Wouldn’t it have been better (a lot) if starting from those “positive” numbers had also begun, for example, a redefinition of new, appropriate and shared metrics for assessing also the extra-economic impacts that museums can generate (largely intangible and subjective) that make them economic actors and activators of different supply chains? But on this point the reform has been lacking, continuing to fail to understand culture as a complex infrastructure with impacts beyond appreciation, making our cultural system not yet truly a mature “system.”

So there are several “downsides” to the reform: as mentioned above, it is a half-hearted reform. Which, still, despite saying it gives freedom to the institutes, has never concretely succeeded in intervening substantially on complex issues and even more on urgencies and distortions (some atavistic) of the entire museum system. Such as obviating the need for new staff, for example, by not changing recruitment methodologies, still bound to ministerial dictates that immutably still respond to the same perspectives of the last century, with, on the one hand, a few rigidly standardized maxi-competitions, in a one-time solution, with thousands of new hires but in general roles, often low-profile, and in any case insufficient to fill staff shortages; and on the other, with few (very few) technical openings that in any case look to historically established and admitted professionalism, often forced into allology, ignoring the fact that there have been so many evolutions in the field (even in the last 5 years alone) that new opportunities and professional needs are being created on a daily basis to which we must respond promptly.

Moreover, over time, precisely because of (or at this point, because of) the autonomies of the large national museums, geographical differences and contrasts in the country have been amplified, exacerbating an already serious polarization of investments, resources (even of the few staff) and interventions on a few areas that we would call main stream, with consequent fractures in the local cultural fabrics. A risky trend that does not seem to have found a solution today, quite the contrary: today autonomous museums, from 20, will grow to 60, each with its own logo and brand. And it is here that the model of museum autonomies sought by Franceschini finds many of its limits: the principle of autonomy based on “exceptionality” works if it is considered extra-ordinary, precisely. Instead, today precisely this exceptionalism is being derubricated to widespread administrative ordinariness, diluting its scope until it becomes systemic, thus without any exceptionalism of its own: while ecumenically slowly all institutes will become “autonomous,” objectively none will be so according to prerogatives of origin but simply will be so in order to devolve management responsibilities, creating many “monads” operating increasingly in toil, according to a “valorization at all costs,” thus without an organic and regulated application of a “country” vision, bending more and more toward an exercise in commercialization alone, without strategy, or worse with only a competitive, ephemerally parochial strategy.

This contribution was originally published in No. 21 of our print magazine Finestre Sull’Arte on paper. Click here to subscribe.

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