People of museums and exhibitions? Perhaps better to speak of people of fetishes and people of art

The day before yesterday a nice article came out in Repubblica in which Antonio Natali, director of the Uffizi, wrote that the museum people and the exhibition people seem to be two different entities. On the occasion of the exhibition on Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino at Palazzo Strozzi, visitors to the Uffizi are entitled to a half-price discount on admission to the exhibition, and in his article Natali spread some statistics: out of 680,000 visitors who have entered the Uffizi since the opening date of the Palazzo Strozzi exhibition, only 2,850 of them have then gone to see the Rosso and Pontormo. According to Natali, it is a sign of different interests between museum-goers and exhibition-goers, and that “what distinguishes the two peoples is the ideological disposition,” in the sense that there would be, on the part of the museum people, the “eagerness to crowd mythical places to worship fetishes” and, on the opposite barricade, “the intellectual curiosity to learn about new works and artisans in order to grow one’s historical consciousness and sharpen one’s sensibilities,” not excluding exceptions, however, such as the worshipers of the Girl with a Pearl Earring who flocked to Bologna this winter to see Vermeer’s painting on display.

Natali’s analysis is certainly interesting and deserves further reflection. Meanwhile, I propose to divide the visitors to exhibitions and museums rather into the people of fetishes, the one masterfully described by Natali in relation to museums (it is true that, proportionally, such people flock more to museums than to exhibitions, but it is Natali himself who says that by now even exhibitions are not immune to this phenomenon), and the people of art: which is the one that attends both exhibitions and museums because it wants to enjoy the works, because it has a desire to see live, to learn and to delve deeper, or even simply because it wants to get excited in front of the works without having to, for that, worship them uncritically. Beware, however: that of the “people of art” is a concept that could lend itself to easy accusations of elitism, but in reality it is as far from any concept of an art reserved for the few. This is because the fundamental assumption that distinguishes the people of art is not a thorough and expert knowledge of works of art, but rather the way in which the people who comprise it approach art: to get excited but also to learn more about a work or an artist, to learn new things, to enrich themselves and, as Natali says, to “grow their historical consciousness and sharpen their sensibility.” These are all operations that can be conducted in both museums and exhibitions, and that do not require art expert training. We always say, after all, thatart is and should be everyone’s.

Queues at the entrance to the Uffizi

The art people, however, need to be encouraged and supported. Instead, more and more operations are catering more to the fetish people. And when it is the Ministry of Cultural Heritage itself, with absurd campaigns such as"if you don’t visit it we’ll take it away," that speaks to the people of fetishes more than to the people of art, it means something is wrong. It means that the ministry is aiming more at box-office operations than at educating citizens in a proper approach to art, because that of the fetish is certainly not the proper way to approach the works of the ancient (and even the contemporary). The fetish has become such because as a fetish it is recognized by the masses: those who visit the Accademia Gallery in Florence (to continue with the example of Michelangelo’s David ) often leave the museum without knowing a comma more about the David than they did once they entered, or the emotions they experience do not go beyond a selfie taken together with the biblical hero, since now the Ministry has also given the fetish people the opportunity to portray themselves in improbable self-shots together with their idols. As Natali points out.

A reversal is therefore needed, but if the ultimate trend is to liberalize selfies (and instead continue to prevent those who do dissemination in a serious and rigorous way, but also earning something on it, from publishing images of works of art), the reversal will be long in coming. The Ministry, in short, is focusing more on marketing than on knowledge: but one has to wonder to what extent the great museums traveled by hundreds, if not thousands, of visitors every day, need marketing initiatives. Freedom of selfie is a great marketing initiative that will perhaps do well for smaller museums (although many of them, even before the new pro-selfie measure, did not in fact prohibit photographs from being taken inside since they believed that shots of the public were a powerful promotional vehicle at no cost), but we need perhaps to reflect on the fact that in the larger museums that are more popular with the fetish audience, the risk is that of creating an untenable coexistence between those who visit museums to worship idols and those who visit to enjoy the works.

It is obvious that we are no one to tell the public how they should approach the works; everyone does so to the extent that suits them. But it is also true that if the people of fetishes gets the upper hand over the people of art, those who will lose out will first of all be all of us who want museums, institutions, organizations, to know how to speak seriously, and rigorously (and, above all, clearly) to those who love art, to know how to organize exhibitions and set up museum itineraries according to projects that encourage quality rather than quantity, in short, to know how to best embody what should be the mission of a museum, which is to produce culture. And secondly, those who will lose out will be the system of culture itself: operations such as “if you don’t visit it, we’ll take it away” incentivize the public to flock en masse to museums inhabited by idols, while leaving smaller centers (or smaller museums) almost depopulated. To realize the effects of this way of reasoning, one need only take a tour of Florence itself. A month ago, during a weekend, we were just in Florence: at three o’clock in the afternoon, the queue to enter the Uffizi had already reached its standard length of one or two hours. And not far away, the church of Saints Michael and Gaetano, which moreover has free admission in contrast to so many other Florentine houses of worship, was completely empty. Yet inside this church are some of the most important paintings of the Florentine seventeenth century, moreover still standing there in the place for which they were conceived and made. Not to mention the fact that so-called art cities are saturated to the brim, and smaller but no less interesting cities have to do triple somersaults to attract visitors.

Several factors are to blame for this. The inability (or unwillingness) on the part of institutions to disseminate real knowledge. The tendency to view art as something to be exploited for the purpose of financial gain, rather than as a way to enrich the public. The nefarious and now tired rhetoric of beauty that has done so much damage, because we take it for granted that we are surrounded by beautiful things and do not care about them. But it is also partly the fault of the museums themselves, which are often unable to speak a language that their audiences can understand, and this benefits the fetish people. Often those who organize exhibitions do so with an audience of other specialists in mind, or at most competent enthusiasts. And this way of reasoning is completely wrong: they use courtly vocabulary even for didactic panels, they use technicalities that a large part of the public does not understand, they omit information that a specialist or expert takes for granted, but in the eyes of a person with little knowledge of the subject matter this is a detrimental practice because his or her understanding of a work or an artist will be inexorably mutilated. The people of the fetish do not worry so much about this: their idols may very well have no illustrative panel and no accompanying didactic apparatus, and many would not have the slightest concern. The art people, however, in poorly understood exhibitions are likely to find themselves bewildered; they understand that those setting up the tours speak a different language, and this, certainly, does not help the cause.

This problem, of course, also affects the Uffizi: we were last there this winter, on the occasion of the exhibition on the Molinari Pradelli collection (entitled The Rooms of the Muses), again on a weekend. Outside, usual queue of about an hour to get in. Inside, the crush in front of the most popular works, which I am not even going to list because we all know what they are anyway. But, in the rooms dedicated to the exhibition on the Molinari Pradelli collection, emptiness: isn’t it that perhaps the Uffizi is also doing little to attract a more aware public? So much so that we rarely (not to say “almost never”) see Florentines inside the gallery. It means that the museum has little appeal to the inhabitants of the city in which it is located. It is true that there is, upstream, a problem of poor art education (where by poor art education, I reiterate, I do not mean knowledge on the subject tout-court, but rather how the public approaches the works), but it is also true that museums often fail to communicate well, fail to attract audiences, and fail to make their albeit wonderful and very interesting exhibitions, such as, precisely, the one on the Molinari Pradelli collection, attractive.

Therefore, deep reflection is needed, but above all, work is needed: on the one hand for better and more education, and on the other hand for better communication. Only in this way can the people of art be helped to prevail over the people of fetishes. Or, perhaps even better, to transform part of the fetish people into new members of the art people.

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.