Rome is an enormous city full of holes and traffic, with an ancient sort of slowness. It has endless suburbs, is obsessed by tourists, but it is also rich in artistic and cultural offerings, self-run spaces, museums, archaeological sites. Lively and exhausting, it is a place full of activity, though all too often that activity is commercial and low in level. The generic public doesn’t put much trust in institutions, and prefers to stick with a sure thing, the classical, the neo-classical, the baroque. You can hardly blame them. The contemporary have high ticket prices and their offerings work for an audience of intellectuals, or sector experts. This is how political choices come into play, smoke-and-mirror operations that try to lure a mass audience. Even in classical art and archaeology the museums try to attract still naive visitors into exhibition snares I have often fallen into myself. Maybe for lack of funds, maybe because of the lack of expertise of curators and installers, the exhibitions are increasingly organized around lofty sounding titles, but they present materials found in a basement somewhere, shown in decrepit places with grumpy personnel. We’ve been telling ourselves that things don’t work so well in Rome for years. And above all, the Italians, Europeans, Westerners are all too well acquainted with the general problems of art and politics. Experimentation is undoubtedly useful: on the one hand, artists will have to reinvent their work; on the other, the politicians will have to change their strategies, starting with a reduction of their power over the territory, and fully cooperating with the various players and operators of the sector. Maybe it will be precisely this crisis that will bring us the much hoped for elements of originality that will influence the generations to come. This will make Rome a better city, perhaps with fewer holes, fewer deserted or closed museums, fewer gates around public areas, fewer cars and more respect for art and culture.
FABRIZIO SARTORI
Artist. Lives and works in Rome.