The culture of prebends – CorrieredelMezzogiorno.it

by time news

twelve o’clock, April 8, 2021 – 07:15

Lack of planning, sloppiness, carelessness and lack of consideration of the cultural sector: this is the figure of the approach of the regional institutions

of Massimiliano Virgilio

For once I allow myself to disagree with the always excellent Vincenzo Trione. The academician and art critic defined a few days ago, in this newspaper, the appointments of the Campania Region in the scientific committees of national museums the indication of a precise idea of ​​culture. In my opinion, however, these appointments, as well as the case of the phantom scientific committee at Madre – almost all of its members resigned after the change of management at the Museum, yet for the institutional website still in office – betray a total lack of of planning, showing all the sloppiness, the carelessness and the lack of consideration of the cultural sector by the regional institutions. A sector with enormous potential, which should be considered strategic for development, and not a terrain in which to distribute prebends.

Let me give another example. Despite the undisputed competence and probity of the people who direct it, the renaming and transformation of the Napoli Teatro Festival into a container of apparently widespread regional theatrical initiatives, concretely attributable to tips scattered throughout the territory, symptomatic of an approach to class culture increasingly invasive and ramshackle politics. An approach that makes the provincialism of local administrators, unable by nature to practice a culture whose life force is equal to that of hunger (to quote Antonin Artaud), its only key to interpreting the Campania reality, seen on the one hand as empty homage of the past, on the other as a generator of tourist flows. Moreover, without ever lacking the name of the cry, the undisputed master who loves mainstream quality the insecurities of our upstart politicians. In doing so, however, the intermediation of technical personnel and experts loses its role, while politics takes the place of artistic directors, museum presidents, sits on the board of directors, even pretends, as we have seen, to offer scientific contributions without possessing no science. In this way, the culture in Campania has been reduced to a reservoir of clienteles, to a system of appointments in which the same men (usually males, whites, over fifty, powerful) are always remixed, voted to settle some old friends, but above all to epic collective hustler with which to co-opt occasionally some rare genuine artistic talent but mostly many, many mediocre ones.

Perhaps not even the much reviled Bourbons had gone so far. A great event here, a beautiful exhibition there, a review made to do. We are reduced to this, completely oblivious to a world around us upset by a pandemic that nothing will give us back as before. Moreover, all this manifests itself as a disfigurement in a dramatic moment for most of the workers of culture, of the artists abandoned to a destiny of invisibility. Not to mention the destinies of all those we will never discover, simply because we are too closed and perched on ourselves to discover them, to form them, to give them an opportunity. There is hope, as history teaches us: even the consolidated Ancien Rgime collapsed due to its blindness and inability to reform itself with respect to the spirit of the time.

April 8, 2021 | 07:15

© Time.News


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