This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by [log in to unmask] /-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\ Special Offer to NY Times customers: Spend $100 & ship free at Starbucks.com http://www.nytimes.com/ads/starbucks/email.html \----------------------------------------------------------/ 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 HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact Alyson Racer at [log in to unmask] or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to [log in to unmask] Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company ========================================================= Important Subscriber Information: The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . 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