<< Art renews populations, and can disclose their lives >>
This the translation for the quote appearing on the Teatro Massimo Vittorio Emanuele in Palermo, Sicily. Given this task for Art, we now need Philippe Daverio to explain Art to us.
Philippe Daverio is, according to a definition by himself, a jacobin rebel of culture and art, deeply convinced that each population is the product of their own cultural and historical heritage. He is a great lover of Italy, plus being a mix of France, Germany and Italy. Having studied art, history, economics and politics for all his life, he is now in a position of understanding even a complex country like Italy. And he can explain to us Italian why we are as we are.
The easiest definition for him, by the way, is as follows: he is into Art.
And this should be really intended in a physical way, because he IS indeed INTO Art. He has the ability to see it, understand it as no one else, and then share it with the masses. He is a collector, a show-man, an art merchant, an historian. He is a man of the Renaissance, and every time I listen to him or watch his tv show PasspARTtout I get more and more convinced that we can still give to us Italians another chance. At least from a cultural point of view. Even today.
Last week there was a conference, quite private let's say, in a Milanese school. He talked of Italy and of the current political, social and cultural situation. Take notes during his lectures is rather difficult, because you find yourself in a cultural hurricane of quotes, book, movies, facts. I did my best, totally captured by his charming and funny voice and his brilliance.
I would like to share with you the most important lesson I learned from the lecture: we Italians need to renew our approach to our artistic heritage.
We must understand it and get convinced that the solution to our current problems is in our roots. We are a mix of populations, that invaded Italy during the centuries and made us so special and different, from mile to mile. Daverio made a comparison between cultura and coltura, that's culture and cultivation. Culture should be cultivated and then harvested, as we do for produce. Of course, cultivating culture in Italy, right now, is really difficult. The dryness of our Institutions and of the majority of people makes it a loosing investment, from the beginning. Indeed, that's the only solution for us. Daverio cannot stand the idea that, in a future, Italy will merely be a cultural amusement park. He would rather destroy everything, instead of seeing us frosted in our artistic heritage, simply getting money from the tourists.
We must understand it and get convinced that the solution to our current problems is in our roots. We are a mix of populations, that invaded Italy during the centuries and made us so special and different, from mile to mile. Daverio made a comparison between cultura and coltura, that's culture and cultivation. Culture should be cultivated and then harvested, as we do for produce. Of course, cultivating culture in Italy, right now, is really difficult. The dryness of our Institutions and of the majority of people makes it a loosing investment, from the beginning. Indeed, that's the only solution for us. Daverio cannot stand the idea that, in a future, Italy will merely be a cultural amusement park. He would rather destroy everything, instead of seeing us frosted in our artistic heritage, simply getting money from the tourists.
We do need to cultivate our heritage and keep producing new pieces, to make us again a creative country.
Thus, he talked about some possible approaches to the cultivation, analyzing approaches from the Illuminism and from the Romanticism.
<< Art renews populations >> but then we have to give an address to the culture. The Illuminism brought up ideas such as << we will give them not what they want, but what they need >>. Very dangerous approach than led also to Nazism.
Romanticism gave us the idea that << the Man is a god while he is dreaming, but just a miserable when he think about that >> (Friedrich Hölderlin). A partial solution again not correct, since the Man that would stop thinking (to dream) will rarely get good results.
The solution is going back to the idea of society by Carl Marx, that was intended as family + religion + culture. What we need now is understand our cultural roots: preserving them and then let them flourish again, bringing new life, new culture.
After the terrible mistakes of the Nazism, when culture was used to twist the population and diffuse wrong ideas, institutions like the "Department of Cultural Heritage" have been always seen as a delicate matter, not to be given that much power. But we do need to empower that, giving it a relevant position in our Government, avoiding cuts and creating a Department able to guide an harvesting of our heritage. Finding new thoughts, new arts, new ways to make it worth-preserving: that is up to us. We cannot just leave it there, for the next tourists. We can solve a lot of problems now, by looking back and understanding our history.
Daverio is optimistic because he knows that we are a weird country, but we do know how to metabolize our cultural heritage. We have always found a way to include the old in the new construction.
E.g Ponte Vecchio ("old bridge") in Florence: instead of being demolished, was enriched with new functions and increments (Vasari, 1565). Paris destroyed a bridge and made the one that is now called Pont Neuf ("new bridge", 1578).
In the recent years, this task of metabolization is getting more difficult and the results less convincing even in Italy. But it's the time to do that again.
Because we are the Country of the Ponte Vecchio, that thinks of the future.
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