Who Is Extracting the Cultural Black Gold?

In theory, through the California company’s Art Project, the agreement between the Google Cultural Institute, Ministry of Cultural Assets of Rome [MiBAC] and Zètema, a cultural organization in Rome, marries a cultural tourism of 9 million visitors to the billion subscribers on the Google+ web platform. However, there are no economic implications to the agreement — deja vu: the same happened with Rai and Cinecitta.

Google puts forth the necessary digital expertise and effortlessly — copyright, et al. — garners for free a cultural heritage of enormous value. It appears that everyone, from Russia to the United Kingdom, India to France, is doing so. The virtualization of museums happens without tickets, not even digital ones, and without e-commerce, because then it would have to pay for tourism that has been fished off the web.

It’s true that there is great and global success of museums, which are ever more attended with their growing events offers. The trend is even more visible in Italy and its capital city. The cash register, however, suffers over both the direct and indirect implications. The major influx to the museums does not even cover the required work. Not only has Italy slipped into fifth place in the world as a tourist destination, but in 2014, for the first time, it registered negative growth, with a 1.3 percent drop in employment. The maximum integration between tourism and culture wanted in the recent internal reform of the Ministry of Cultural Assets is far from becoming a reality. Among the obstacles, bizarre decisions particularly stand out, like the elimination of the internal organization Promuovitalia and the preparation for the similar fate of Enit, the former national tourism agency transformed into a public economic entity. Arcus, the planned organization for the development of art of MiBAC – whose restoration of the so-called medieval Sistine Chapel of the Santi Quattro Coronati of Rome was the only thing that needed to be completed – was supposed to shut down at the beginning of 2014 and was saved in extremis instead.

For its part, “Big G” is very active in the tourism field. At the same time as its Art Project, it developed “Made in Italy,” which is a cinematic flattery of the things our country has achieved and a digital marketing offer aimed at our undertakings in collaboration with the University Ca’ Foscari and Symbola, the well-known red-green foundation of Realacci and Legambiente. Shortly, a first meeting in Sicily has been planned. It’s not that during these years the digitalization of Italy and Europe’s cultural world has been shuttered. Even now, an announcement of 8 million euros is underway for the improvement of the management of the data of Europeana, the platform of the museums of the old continent; 25 million objects from 2,200 institutes were put online, and 1.5 million of them are Italian.

Seemingly, there is no conflict with the 45,000 objects in 3D, the 60 museums and 408 collections that Google manages. However, where the Americans take the user on a trip through the museums in an almost magnificent teleportation, Europeana is a gigantic blog and a prescriptive and discouraging list of images, photos, objects and texts taken out of their context. Even so, its directors, the director of the German national library, Niggemann, and the British Cousin — already in charge of European U.N. volunteer affairs, holder of a doctorate in Turkish-Arab nautical maps from the 16th century — are enthusiastic.

Where the Americans allow for visiting museums and works as in real life — watching performances, reading books and concentrating on sites of major notoriety — the Europeans collect lists, indexes and archives and launch themselves into researching objects still held by the private groups that emerged from World War I. To manage the Italian part, CulturaItalia, third in size after the French and Spanish, MiBAC has assigned LCCU, the Institute for the Singular Catalogue, for years a client of the technology platform OPAC SBN — more than 13 million biographical entries strong.

The web networks of the museums, like those of libraries and others, are like yellow pages on the web: lists of physical places and author’s rights, thought up in an era predating the Internet. And then, however, it is necessary, if for nothing other than being modern and opening up to the online world, that the LCCU create, alongside the logistical anagraphics, ties to social networks and more commercial sites like Amazon, without offense to all the initial rigidity. In such a way, the public investment and the ministerial and semipublic structures create a well-liked and free distribution channel for third-party users.

It does not just seem impossible to present culture in a friendly manner to potential tourists; efforts to find ways to recover profit have been unsuccessful. MiBAC seems to be trying. It has tax-exempted 30 percent of the digitization of touristic structures and 65 percent of private donations to museums, archeological sites, libraries and theaters. However, when the Art Bonus law was accused of laying the groundwork for private participation in cultural management, MiBAC and the minister retreated back into their shells.

The attempts by the Rome municipality, after a long vacatio legis, freed the Valle and Volturni theaters and the America cinema from their occupations, but were unsuccessful in giving a direction to Macro and in preventing the festering problems of the Opera and Eliseo theaters. As the only answer, the Babylon Post magazine sounded the alarm on the “cultural question,” accusing the institutions of ignoring the problem. Soon, many voices sounded in agreement, from those of the important institutions of public culture to sector organizations, all the way to the newly born Council of Contemporary Roman Art.

MiBAC exhibits exaggerated economic figures for culture (214 billion euros, 15.3 percent of the GDP), which relate to little except for the central problem. In reality, in the most substantiated interpretation, the museum (like other cultural institutions) must neither remain a passive expense, nor must the inevitable modernization and digitization respond to economic criteria according to the preferences of the consumers.

The era of the common cultural good is past us, while that of participatory culture still has not taken off. Both depend on public financing, whose inexorable end does not manage to pacify us. Rather than consuming it, we talk about the death of culture. Like Settis, who foreshadows the end of museums, which instead of tending to their primary reason for being in existence — that being custody over cultural heritage — only think of making money. This is an unintentional accusation for actions that are far from having been taken. Therefore, we need to stick to the evidence. Should we admit that our intention to transform culture, our black gold, into wealth is empty demagogy? Or continue to finance the millions of digital projects not made for the adept? Should we trust cultural visits to the artisanal passion of staff and guides? Or drop the failing state policies on tourism and focus on restoration?

While waiting, the great touristic cultural web marketing of the over-the-top Americans tends toward the extraction of this so-called black gold.