the courier debates
NoonJuly 16, 2022 – 20:42
The playwright Mimmo Borrelli has already begun to do his part by criticizing the way in which Procida was worked on as the capital of culture. So, let’s take it a step further
from Giancristiano Desiderio
ILet’s start with an anecdote, which never hurts. In 1921 it was the sixth centenary of Dante’s death and Benedetto Croce was minister of public education in the last Giolitti government. We know how Italians are made, they care more about anniversaries than poets and so many places, from Ravenna to Florence, pressured themselves to celebrate the anniversary. The minister, however, could not hear us from that ear because Croce could not bear culture transformed into rhetoric. So, in an official speech, he said: The best way to celebrate Dante is to study him. And he, of course, set a good example and published Dante’s poetry that a century later remains a fixed point in the criticism and taste of the poetry of our greatest poet.
The anecdote can be useful to focus on two related things: Procida, the Italian capital of culture 2022 and the proposal of Professor Aldo Schiavone to dedicate the entire next year to culture, starting with the figures of Raffaele La Capria, who recently passed away. , and from the seventieth anniversary of Croce’s death which falls on November 20. There is enough to respond in the manner of Croce: Do we want a year dedicated to culture? Well, then, let it be the year of anti-rhetorical culture.
The playwright Mimmo Borrelli has already begun to do his part by criticizing – as he had already done in the near past on the question of the management of funds destined for culture and on the consequential servility, alas, of intellectuals in no particular order – precisely the way in which one worked on Procida as the capital of culture.
So, let’s take a step forward and say it as it is: whenever there is such an acknowledgment, now by a ministry, now by, for example, UNESCO, there is a universal feeling of jubilation as if that recognition were a kind of magic wand capable of transforming pumpkins into carriages and frogs into princes. In short, a cascade of unbearable rhetoric that makes your arms fall.
On such occasions, everyone starts singing and chanting things like: How beautiful we are, how good we are, this recognition is a great turning point, nothing will ever be the same again. Result? Procida Italian capital of culture a hole in the water and everything exactly as before if not worse. How come? Let’s say it without rhetoric: because culture is a job like all the others and, indeed, even more difficult and it is improvised, nor is it created at the table with public funding which only has the effect on the one hand of drugging places and markets and from above. to enslave the critical sense on which, in the last and first instance, freedom and civil vivacity are based. Can anyone deny with the facts that in Campania the cultural industry is not used by the political-administrative power with obvious clientelist objectives?
This is why the year of culture in Naples and – I dare to say – in Campania imagined by Aldo Schiavone or anti-rhetorical or not. It cannot be born as an emanation of the departments or ministries but must have its own autonomy and its civil virtue because the first quality of culture lies precisely in the conscious and public criticism it must carry out of the institutions to make them dignified and not employer.
And since we started with an anecdote and well close with an anecdote. Often and gladly not only are we exulted when Unesco recognizes this or that property as a heritage of humanity but we organize ourselves to propose to Unesco the recognition of other goods as heritage of humanity, as happened recently with coffee! Well, Croce himself, realizing well how the thing would end and knowing full well that culture or autonomy of judgment or servitude invited UNESCO to do the only sensible thing it could do: dissolve.
July 16, 2022 | 20:42
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