Unacceptable treatment of the director of the Museo della Gente Trentina. A museum is not just the number of visitors

What happened on Thursday, September 13, during the W l’Italia program on Rete 4, to the director of the Museo degli Usi e Costumi della Gente Trentina in San Michele all’Adige, Giovanni Kezich, is unacceptable. Unacceptable for two main reasons. The first: in front of nine hundred thousand viewers, the work of a museum was put in a bad light without there being any real basis for it (and we will see why below). Secondly, in the opinion of the writer, a good service was not rendered to the public, which should be informed by an in-depth journalistic broadcast in the most impartial and useful way possible. On the contrary, they were made spectators of a show that seemed almost aimed at leaking a very precise thesis, that of the museum being excessively expensive in relation to the number of paying visitors.

John Kezich during the broadcast

Thus, in the course of a broadcast in which even inadmissible and decidedly inappropriate tones were reached (from allusive comments in the opening report about museum employees returning from a business trip, to real mockery, such as when one of the guests addressed an ironic “don’t get too tired” to the director who was informing the guests that the following week he would be traveling to Dubrovnik to pick up a European award), in which blatant falsehoods were also supported (such as the one according to which the Museo degli Usi e Costumi della Gente Trentina has “more employees than visitors”), Giovanni Kezich was thrown into the middle of a fray that did not allow him to expound his reasons in a dialogue that had even the semblance of being serene and constructive: with the guests in the studio not letting him finish his sentences and talking down to him, and without anyone taking his side seriously (because it is not even acceptable to argue that the money spent on the Trentino museum can be justified because the state has to provide welfare for its citizens), the director, who is certainly not at all used to audiences of that kind, was not put in the most appropriate conditions to defend the reasons for his museum.

In essence, the broadcast got a profoundly wrong message across: that a museum’s performance should be measured by the number of visitors who pay a ticket fee to enter its halls. And consequently, a museum that spends too much in relation to the number of those who visit it, would be a museum that wastes: a partial and reductive thesis, since a museum is not an amusement park that lives only according to how many people visit it. Visitors are but one part of a museum’s activities: certainly, they are the most visible and easily measurable component, but they are not the only one. Just take the Museo degli Usi e Costumi della Gente Trentina, one of the most important ethnographic museums in Italy whose activities extend far beyond visits. The museum of San Michele all’Adige, in fact, is also equipped with a valuable library specializing in cultural anthropology and Alpine and Trentino history, which has a collection of about seventeen thousand volumes, of which one thousand five hundred are part of a historical collection of books and periodicals published between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while one thousand constitute the collection of the museum’s founder, Giuseppe Šebesta, an important writer and ethnographer. Still, the museum has an audiovisual archive that includes important documents on the customs of Trentino, some of them produced by the local RAI office.

The fact that the one and a half million euros that the museum’s operation requires each year also serves to enable the proper running of the library and archive activities, alone, would be enough to disprove the theses of those who believe that this figure should be related solely to the number of tickets sold. But there is also much more: the Museo degli Usi e Costumi della Gente Trentina organizes study conferences every year, as well as many activities on the territory, which thus make it a museum that, in fact, goes out of its halls to meet the inhabitants (and it is perhaps superfluous to emphasize the fundamental importance of this aspect in terms of positive spillovers ranging from inclusion and integration to the dissemination of culture and social cohesion). And again, the museum directed by Kezich does a lot of research in the field of ethnography: for example, it heads an international project on European carnivals, which involves a dozen countries and is sponsored and supported by the Culture Program of the European Union. And there is nothing strange in all this (on the contrary, we are dealing with the case of a very active museum, to whose 3,827 paying visitors in 2016 it is necessary to add also non-paying visitors, users of educational activities and visitors to events, which make the museum reach the quota of about 25,000 presences, and this is just to calculate how many have entered within its walls), nor mysterious: the museum’s website has a rich “transparent administration” section where it is possible to see what the items of expenditure are and where the money goes.

What is certain is that if we forget that there are very few museums that manage to live on ticket revenue alone, if we do not or do not want to recognize the true value of culture, if we do not take into account the fact that museums perform an important social function that cannot be measured by the sole measure of visitors (we should decide, for once, to consider a museum the equivalent of a school or a hospital, and not an amusement park), and especially if we pillory an entire museum (a shameful attitude: there is no other way to describe it) and expose to public ridicule its director, who, by the way, is an ethnologist of international stature, we have only two options: study seriously and come back to talk when we have some minimal basis for dealing with the topic we want to discuss, or deal with something else.

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