The return of McHeritage

Culturegrrl has been keeping everyone updated on the plans of the Italian Government to install a 'heritageczar' to preside over the vastly underfunded Italian cultural heritage. Mr. Mario Resca, formerly of McDonald's Italy has promised to look at heritage like "a strategic asset, like oil, with zero costs, because it's there" and, despite a complete lack of art-historical background promises to succeed, because when he headed McDonald's, he didn't know anything about food either! The fact that the former casino-owner and McDonald's director is a personal friend of prime minister Silvio "Nice tan" Berlusconi, makes the situation all the more fishy.

The odd thing is, ultracapitalist rhetoric aside, the few suggestions Resca has made, are not totally unreasonable at all. He proposes to lend out art to foreign museums á la Louvre to make revenue for the constantly cash-deprived Italian culture industry. He also promises to make cultural heritage more accessible, a goal, as a reader of Culturegrrl points out, is sorely needed.

However, getting a few details right does not mean that one should ignore the elephant in room. We'll set aside the political considerations of exactly how wise it is to let a single man preside over the entire Italian culture industry and focus on the deeper cultural implications of this decision: Mr. Berlusconi installed a man who considers a Big Mac to be essentially the same thing as a Michelangelo, as the head honcho of a three thousand year old heritage business.

While the statement that in a month he is likely to have changed all of his positions offers a glimmer of hope, the comment about art being essentially like oil, because both are strategic natural assests, is almost a definition of a neoliberal reductio ad absurdum. Probably the least healthy way to think about cultural heritage is to say that because it can, in some cases, be utilized in a capitalist way, it would follow that it is inherently a market commodity and should be treated as such. Such an attitude is likely to lead to an ignorance of the more nuanced aspects of cultural heritage (public ownership, symbolic meaning to different groups of people, worth as an educational and scientific object, etc.) that Italy, with it's heritage already underfunded, could not afford. Clearly there are ways how good PR, smart entrepeneurship and a careful balance between pandering to the (paying) masses and catering for the interests of the non-paying public and of small interest groups (such as students, researchers and people who have a special connection with various pieces of cultural heritage) could pull Italian heritage out of the financial slump that they are in, but because it is a very fine line that needs to be treaded, it should be done by someone who is as aware of the non-market qualities of heritage as he is of the potentials for making profit.