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Italy Plans to Have Private Sector Run Museums

December 3, 2001

By MELINDA HENNEBERGER




ROME, Dec. 2 - A law partially privatizing Italy's museums
is expected to pass easily in Parliament here, where the
pro-business, center- right coalition of Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconi, who is also the country's richest man,
wins virtually every vote.

"It's a done deal now," Daniel Berger, a consultant to the
ministry of culture, said last week after the bill was
tweaked in a way that satisfied even the opposition. The
proposal is part of Italy's annual budget bill, which needs
to be approved formally before the end of the year.

The government said it planned to take bids and turn over
management of its some 3,000 museums. But it will retain
legal ownership of the properties and remain responsible
for the preservation of Italy's extravagant share of the
world's art treasures.

The minister of culture, Giuliano Urbani, did not make the
state's continuing role sound like much of a safeguard,
though, when he explained that the whole rationale for the
law was that the Italian government was simply not up to
the job of handling its rather overwhelming heritage.

"Right now 30 percent of our artistic heritage is in
storage - and slightly dubious storage," Mr. Urbani, a
political-science professor and longtime adviser to Mr.
Berlusconi, said in a recent interview in his office.
"Because we have so much of it, we can't afford to get it
out of the basement."

The thought of turning Caravaggio and Bernini over to the
private sector, especially under Mr. Berlusconi (whose
television empire's hallmark is its quiz shows with nearly
naked women), set off something of a panic in the
international art world. Directors from 27 foreign museums
signed a letter asking Italy to reconsider.

"There is the sense that profit motives could obliterate
the study and scholarly work," said an official of a
prominent American institution who demanded anonymity,
adding that no museum wanted to be too vocal in its
criticism for fear that Italy might stop lending it art.
"It's a precedent" that's worrying, he said.

At first the idea was widely condemned in Italy, too. "They
are ideological, with a market-oriented approach," Giovanna
Melandri, the former culture minister under the last
center-left governments, said recently, referring to the
current government. "It won't work because there are only a
handful of properties - the Colosseum and the Uffizi,
nothing more - that don't lose money."

The plan has never been in real trouble, though, because
critics lack the votes to stop passage of the bill. And
political opposition appears to have evaporated after the
wording of the law was changed slightly last week. As
amended by the culture committee in the Parliament's lower
house, the bill now says that museums may be run by
"nongovernmental" rather than by "private" interests, a
distinction that even culture ministry officials say makes
no real difference.

The law also now says that museum management contracts will
not be automatically awarded to the highest bidders but
that other qualifications will be taken into account as
well. How the law will work in practice depends largely on
the set of regulations implementing it, regulations that
the ministry of culture will draft in the next six months
or so.

"Everything depends on the regulations, so I'm not alarmed,
I'm just waiting," said Caterina Bon Valsassina, the fine
arts commissioner for Milan, who oversees the Pinacoteca di
Brera, one of Italy's most important museums, where the
permanent collection includes Raphael's "Marriage of the
Virgin" and Caravaggio's "Supper at Emmaus."

"It's totally useless to scream before something happens,"
Ms. Bon Valsassina said. "If they want to put a naked
person in my museum as a special event, then I will
scream."

The most significant safeguard, she said, was that no one
ever got rich running a museum. "We're expensive: heating,
lights, salaries, cleaning," she said, "and from a
practical point of view you will find no one private who
will want us."

Mr. Urbani, an unassuming and unself-consciously unartsy
man in a gray suit, said there were other reasons that
private companies, foundations or other groups might want
to take on the job. "People fear they'll come just for
profit," he said. "But they'll come for image."

And when they do, he is sure, they will do a much better
job of marketing and fund-raising, he said.

Mr. Urbani added that much of the criticism from museum
directors really concerned their worry that Italy's "easy
lending" of its art to foreign museums might slow a bit
under the new management.

They have reason to be concerned, too, he said: "There will
be loans, but they will be done with even more care for
where they're going and to whom." Asked what sort of new,
stricter guidelines there might be, he said only, "If this
is going to Yankee Stadium, I say no."

He knocked down another complaint, that the new law would
allow the marketing of cheesy reproductions of Italy's art
treasures, by saying that reproductions are already not
only legal but also ubiquitous.

The possibility that ticket prices could soar under a
free-market system, he said, would be checked by
international criticism.

Mr. Berger, who was in charge of merchandising at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, was hired as a
consultant here in 1993 to bring modern marketing
techniques to Italy. When the law first allowing
concessions of any kind in Italian museums passed here that
year, he said, it caused a much bigger fuss than this
latest proposed change has.

He said the partial privatization was no threat to Italian
art: "Private isn't only G.M. And American museums are
private not-for-profit already. In Britain it's a mix of
private and public, and in France it's run by the state.
This Italian way will help alleviate a burden the state
just can't handle any more."

Normally Mr. Urbani, who has no art background, keeps a
lower profile than the far flashier undersecretary for
culture, Vittorio Sgarbi, who dates models and is a
well-known art explainer and popularizer: sort of an
Italian Sister Wendy.

But Mr. Urbani has stepped out in front now, for the first
time, to absorb most of the criticism of the law.

Though affable in the interview, he declined to give a
quick art tour of the paintings on his office walls in the
ministry of culture. "Nothing special," he said, looking
around and giving the impression that he had not
necessarily noticed them before.

He has worries other than the privatizing issue. Since
Sept. 11 he has been busy trying to beef up security at
historical sites, and he is also straining to come up with
a way to revitalize the Italian film industry, which needs
"an infusion of money," he said. But even as Mr. Urbani
said this, he made clear that he was not entirely
uncritical of corporate sponsorship. When an adviser
interjected at that point that Philip Morris was helping
Italy restore some of the classic films of the postwar
period, Mr. Urbani scowled and snapped, "Oh, come on, there
are others doing that, too."

Still, he insisted, there is no reason to assume that the
new private-sector managers will be any less pure in their
respect for great art than state custodians have been. "The
risk of vulgarity is unfortunately never eliminated," Mr.
Urbani said. "Remember, the state makes mistakes and ugly
restorations, too."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/03/arts/design/03MUSE.html?ex=1008405846&ei=1&en=703509021f6bb717



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