editorial
twelve o’clock, April 3, 2021 – 07:39 am
of Enzo d’Errico
Lor I know, discussing culture on the eve of Easter, with the vaccination plan progressing slowly and the contagion curve climbing fast, may seem like an extravagance. But we must also begin to cast our eyes on the future, especially if the future is being built now, taking advantage of the distracted silence that now hangs over any event unrelated to the pandemic. Let’s take what is happening in the main regional museums. Well, yesterday the Corriere del Mezzogiorno has previewed the new teams that will support the directors inside Mann, Capodimonte and Palazzo Reale. A few weeks ago, a similar restyling was carried out in the Royal Palace of Caserta. Okay, you are thinking, what’s the problem? To try to answer fully, it is necessary to take the traditional step back and focus attention on another question: must culture be a fundamental asset for the post-Covid rebirth of this region and, more generally, of the entire South? In my subdued opinion, yes. And without a shadow of a doubt. But evidently the president Vincenzo De Luca is convinced of the opposite. The facts demonstrate this, starting with the choice of his adviser that anyone, for decorum, would have set aside after being sentenced in the first instance for tax evasion.
it is useless to linger further on a story that our readers know well because we are the only ones to have reported it (see under culture = media reverence) in distant times. We could collect, then, the innumerable contemptuous declarations of the governor towards contemporary art, the money poured out for local festivals, the sudden changes of direction on the strategies to be followed and the stamp of belonging imposed on the Napoli Teatro Festival with the change of name, all clues that lead to an indisputable proof: culture, for the top management of Palazzo Santa Lucia, is nothing more than a way to dispense benefits intended to build electoral consensus and fertilize those interest groups that, with the alibi of best practices, cultivate their ambitions but carefully avoid disturbing the operator. a case that for six years there has not been a regional councilor for culture, that is a figure of political intermediary capable of listening to the demands of the sector and translating them (if possible) into administrative acts? No, only the logical consequence of what has been said so far. And the same, of course, concerns health care, transport and public works, that is to say the nerve centers – as regards spending and tasks – of any Region.
Having said that, let’s examine the matter of nominations within museums, where we are even shuffling the cards, a confusion of roles and functions that would leap in the eyes of a first-year law student, because you don’t need a degree to know what the board of directors and the committee do scientific within a museum: the former administers it, the latter carries out an advisory function on questions of a scientific nature. It follows that the former may also include spurious figures destined to offer a contribution of innovative management experience, while the latter must necessarily include people who have such a solid curriculum behind them as to give the museum an added value in its research work.
Too bad, however, that while Dario Franceschini and his ministerial staff followed these criteria in the selection of their representatives, De Luca did exactly the opposite with his appointments. Let’s take three examples: Rosanna Romano, Father Antonio Loffredo and Emilio Di Marzio, respectively inserted by the governor in the scientific committees of Mann, Capodimonte and the Royal Palace of Caserta. There would have been some objection even if they had been placed on the board of directors but in the end, after all, some connection between the position and the curriculum would have justified their presence. What, on the other hand, are the scientific merits of an excellent manager of the Region (who nevertheless owns the cultural funds and, therefore, reveals a marked conflict of interest), of a priest who works on the recovery of the Rione Sanit ( also with art, true, but perhaps without being an international expert like Capodimonte would deserve it) and a local politician who, at the height of his career, was included (again by De Luca) in the board of directors of Mercadante? Boh …
Yet here we are not talking about museums without history but about three pearls of our artistic heritage, institutions that should keep pace with the most prestigious art sites in the world and which, on the contrary, De Luca reduces to a crossroads for appointments more or less related to his interests. Do we really think this is the best way to compete, when the virus is tamed, on the global art tourism market? Or, more likely, the governor and his acolytes see culture as an employment agency with which to sort devotees into command posts and hire clientes from the rear, in defiance of any strategy capable of crossing the future and, even more, innovation. Naples is full of young people who, on a global scale, work to weld the relationship between culture and the digital world, but their names are unknown at Palazzo Santa Lucia.
Just as it overflows with established intellectuals of European caliber who would have brought prestige to the newly appointed scientific committees: Biagio de Giovanni, Cesare de Seta, Paolo Macry, Roberto Esposito, Stefano De Caro, Francesco Barbagallo, Aurelio Musi, Emma Giammattei, Luigi Mascilli Improve and I could go on and on. Is it possible that not even one of these names came to the mind of the president of Campania? Unfortunately yes, not only possible but safe. Because, in spite of ourselves, we are witnessing the transformation of Naples into a great Salerno, where a feudal system of government is taking root in general indifference that repays the complicit silence of valvassori and valvassini with the privileged lanes for vaccinations (read again the Unit chapter of Crisis), some appointments lavished with magnanimity to the faithful, edicts as bombastic as they have no practical effects (remember the Sputnik case) and other alms of various kinds. Everything happens in a dim light, in a half-light that risks tearing our own democratic fabric and making it more vulnerable once we can return to life.
I could call into question the Pd, who has just paid homage to De Luca by assigning to his son Piero (a deputy for just three years, elected with the remains in Caserta and defeated in the home college) the post of vicar group leader in the Chamber imagining, perhaps, of thus receiving the green light in the choice for the candidate for mayor.
But it would be like appealing to nothing, because such is the consistency of this party in Naples and beyond. Rather, we regret that an authoritative figure like Alessandro Barbano – once director of The morning and today co-director of the Corriere dello Sport, president of the Campania Festival of Festivals and now also director of the Palazzo Reale – ends up, in spite of himself, to become a testimonial of this political-cultural system marked by autocracy. Those who have written Too many rights, one of the most interesting and counter-current Italian essays in recent years, cannot collect too many posts without asking some questions about the fatal identification between his undisputed history as a liberal intellectual and that of those who, on the other hand, consider intellectual penguins to be living room. Coupons to mock in some direct facebook to indulge his people of Sanfedisti.
April 3, 2021 | 07:39
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