The new Icom definition of a museum? Timid and disregards the lessons of the pandemic

There is no trace of it. In the new definition of “museum” by ICOM, International Council of Museums, which may well respond better to a contemporary, inclusive museum concept, such as was needed until the health emergency from Covid-19, the very years of the pandemic have failed to capitalize. Yet the resilience of the relationship between communities and these cultural institutions has been challenged in recent years by a new fact, namely, that in order to safeguard public health, museums may be forced to relinquish their status as institutions "open to the public," albeit an identifiable one. And although since 2015 in Italy museums have been equated with essential public services, such as hospitals and schools.

One could have gone further in reflection and its landings, in short, and instead stopped at the ex ante debate. This is what, instead, we had tried to do on Finestre Sull’Arte, thanks to in-depth reflections not only on legal matters, but also on the ideal and values level, with constitutionalist Enrico Grosso and then with a specific discussion on the definition with Salvatore Settis. “It is precisely after the experience of the global health emergency that the discussion should receive renewed impetus toward a new definition of museum,” we wrote.

Of course, it cannot be said that the current definition, after the failure of the 2019 Kyoto General Conference, is not the result of a widely debated path. “Conducted with great balance and transparency,” ICOM Italy recalls, “by the International ICOM Define Committee, coordinated by Bruno Brulon and Lauran Bonilla-Merchav, it has seen a wide participation of National and International Committees, called upon to consult their members on several occasions and to express their assessments. The fourth and final consultation, in which ICOM Italy also participated, had concerned the 5 proposals drawn up by the Committee (i.e., by the five groups, of 4 members each, in which it was divided), taking into account the key words and concepts most shared by the international community. Once the preferences and some timely proposals for changes/additions of key words between one definition and the other were gathered, the two final texts were arrived at and presented in the Advisory Council of May 2022, whose vote lifted the last reservation.” But it is precisely the long articulation of the process that leads us to wonder whether the effects of the pandemic on museums were a topic of discussion.

Comparing the proposal approved in Prague on August 24 this year (the eighth since 1946, when ICOM was founded) with the previous “Vienna definition” of 2007 precisely the greater clarification of the social function of museums, not only “open to the public,” but “accessible and inclusive,” with the specification that this condition is also addressed to “diversity,” offers itself as an edifying statement partly contradicted by recent historical events. No, museums may not be open to the public. It is a decision that can pass (as in fact it has passed) over the head of society by the discretionary will, that is, not based on incontrovertible scientific facts, of the superior policymaker. And if this has happened it is because museums have not been recognized, and continue even under the new definition not to be recognized, a function related precisely to the health sphere.

The legally mandated closure of museums in 2020 to contain the spread of Covid-19, between late February and May and then between November and December, has also highlighted that in a state of emergency, culture is not “a commodity of first necessity” or soul care for proven citizens. Unlike schools, health care and transportation, to which they were equated as essential public services, museums needed to be closed period.

In December of that year with Enrico Grosso, Professor of Constitutional Law at the Department of Law at the University of Turin, we anticipated the Constitutional Court’s pronouncement that later ruled on the legitimacy of using Dpcms to introduce pandemic containment measures, including those for museums. In the lengthy interview, Grosso explained to us that “the protection of public safety (and the essential levels of health) in emergency situations, is in any case the responsibility of the State by reason of what is established in art. 117 of the Constitution”; that “the state has the power to adopt rules limiting the enjoyment of cultural property” and, ultimately, that "state legislation closing museums does not do so because it intends to dictate a discipline ’on museums’ (...), but insofar as it intends to dictate a discipline on the protection of public safety (which is within its competence), which also has an indirect, inevitable but not illegitimate, influence on the enjoyment of museums. And which therefore prevails."

This was on the line of law. The next step had been to try not to consider, however, the two spheres (culture and health) as so clearly distinct in order to get to the heart of the matter, which transcends from the legal sphere to the scientific and cultural sphere. Would maintaining access to museums and archaeological parks (which are also off limits) during the health emergency have been possible if they had been recognized as “useful tools for the psycho-physical health of citizens”? We believe so. Not “only,” then, places for “study, education and enjoyment,” purposes present in the 2007 ICOM definition, reproposed in the new one with some modifications and additions (“for education, pleasure, reflection and sharing of knowledge”).

“Tools useful for the psycho-physical health of citizens.” The ground, in Italy, had been prepared precisely on the legal level: “And here comes into play,” we wrote, "the 2015 law that qualified museums as ’essential public services,’ in the same way, that is, as hospitals. If we do not really want to believe, as was also objected, that in reality the 2015 measure was nothing more than ’a legislative hypocrisy’ with the real purpose of contracting the right to strike in the sector, we observe that numerous scientific studies show how the ’contact’ with works of art has proven benefits for people’s mental and physical health (in particular, we point to the ’Culture is Health’ portal that records best practices in this regard). A contact, we added, which, given the specificity of the assets in question, can only take place through a visit in person to a museum, a ’hospital of the soul’ (like Marguerite Yourcenar’s libraries in her novel Memoirs of Hadrian), and not through the virtual ones experimented on a large scale precisely during this emergency, and which have, moreover, registered little response from users. The benefits on the psyche constitute an element of particular relevance especially in this period of semi-isolation (or isolation, depending on the levels of restriction for different areas of the country) related to the pandemic."

Hence the question we posed, "ultimately, shouldn’t this role recognized by numerous medical studies make them useful tools to participate in that ’protection of public safety’? If it is permissible to take a walk in the open air, why is this same walk forbidden to be taken in an archaeological park, which has an advantage in terms of not only physical health, but also on the spirit for the cultural enrichment it produces? Therefore, it is not only about the very serious economic damages suffered by the various public or private institutions in the field of cultural heritage, but also about relevant issues from a social point of view."

Having ascertained that there was no conflict between the Dpcm and the 2015 law (the Court, we said, later confirmed this assumption), with Grosso we moved to another level of reflection: “The question is: is the closure of museums a necessary ”sacrifice“ to protect health? Is it conversely an unnecessary sacrifice? Or is it even a counterproductive sacrifice?” That is, we were taking ourselves to the “plane of the battle of ideas and the cultural campaign. Here each of us can legitimately offer our contribution,” the constitutionalist further observed. It was, in other words, and still is, a matter of shifting the terrain of confrontation to that of “legitimate political observations” or “politics of law.” That is, the wide-open possibility of convincing the political interlocutor of the reasonableness of those remarks.

Here is the heart of the matter, useful to overcome the “contradiction” established by the Dpcms, 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): the recognition of the museum as a place that is also capable of improving the psycho-physical well-being of individuals and that therefore participates in that “protection of public safety” (thus not in conflict with it), if acquired in the new ICOM definition could have been an important step in view of its transposition into national regulations: so that they are no longer “assessments that escape judicial review” (Grosso again). And, let’s say it proudly, it had been the proposal with which ICOM Italy had participated in the international call of the MDPP (Standing Committee on Museum Definition, Prospects and Potentials), which among the purposes of a museum had tried to introduce precisely the promotion of "community well-being."

“Those who close museums consider human beings as mere bodies, as if there is no spiritual component,” Settis had told us. And he recalled that “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.”

The distinguished professor also uses that term “well-being” we have just mentioned. Its translation in the English language (“wellbeing”), as noted by Tiziana Maffei, president of ICOM Italy, 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. “A very important point,” Settis gave us credit, recalling the long history that “the condition of happiness” has from Greek philosophy to contemporary moral philosophy: “already Aristotle understood very well that in a condition of ’eudaimonia’ human beings are not only happier, but being happier they are also more productive.”

“With closed museums not only budgets suffer but citizens, and especially children, students, families,” more than 80 museum directors said in an appeal to Franceschini. It was already, hot on the heels of the need for a reconsideration of the role and purpose of museums related to the effects of the pandemic.

“Health,” “well-being,” “happiness.” These are not lexical niceties. Even the adoption at the terminological level of “social” would have been more effective in indicating the public purpose of a museum. Especially since, in line with the Faro Convention, the new ICOM definition emphasizes the active role (“with the participation of communities”) on the part of the museum visitor, and not merely the passive role of receptor. Of "social use of the cultural and environmental heritage" (and therefore also of museums) speaks a distant sector law that the Sicilian Region had given itself in 1977 (No. 80, still in force), where it identified among its purposes, along with protection and enhancement, also precisely the civic purpose. This purpose, understood as increasing awareness of the value of cultural heritage and, ultimately, improving the quality of life of the community, could, then, also be interpreted more specifically as improving the “psycho-physical health of citizens.”

Although, therefore, it contains innovative elements such as, in addition to the promotion of inclusiveness and community participation, also “the call for ethical behavior (with obvious reference to ICOM’s Code of Ethics) and the need for professionalism in the performance of the museum’s own functions”, as ICOM Italy explains, the new definition of a museum appears timid and remains inadequate to the new issues posed by recent world history and the concrete effects of its transposition, not only by the international museum communities, by including it in statutes and codes of ethics, but also, through changes in legislation, by those political bodies that “condition” the life of museums.

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