3L1- Ubi major, minor cessat: A comparative study of the relation between changing cultural policy rationales and globalization in post-1980s England and Italy by Eleonora Belfiore Vol. 2 A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Cultural Policy Studies 0 Universityof Warwick,Centre for CulturalPolicy Studies January2006 CONTENTS 6. Cultural policy in Italy: Origins, historical development and trends 219 recent ................................................................. CULTURAL ASSETS VS. PERFORMINGARTS: AN ITALIAN PECULIARITY 223 ........................................................................... THE THREE PHASES OF ITALIAN CULTURAL POLICY 228 .................. PHASE I: THE PRESERVATION OF THE CULTURAL HERITAGE FROM z THE PRE-UNITARY TIMES TO THE DEMISE OF FASCISM 232 .............. PHASE II: FROM THE POSTWAR YEARS TO THE 1970S 260 ................ PHASE 3: FROM THE 1980s TO THE PRESENT DAY 274 ..................... ITALIAN CULTURAL POLICY IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM: SELLING OFF THE COLOSSEUM? 307 ............................................................................... 7. `Instrumentalism' across borders: Towards an explanatory framework 325 ..................................................................... UNDERSTANDING THE'DISCOURSE OF BELEAGUREMENT'......... 326 NEO-LIBERAL GLOBALIZATION AND THE TRIUMPH OF ECONOMIC REASON 329 ................................................................................. NEOLIBERALISM: A SCENARIO WITH NO ALTERNATIVES? 336 ............. THE THEORY OF'POLICY TRANSFER' 355 ....................................... THE CRUCIAL QUESTION: WHO TRANSFERS WHAT? 359 ...................... 8. Conclusions 370 ............................................................... 9. Appendix 382 ................................................................... BENI CULTURAL!: THE DEFINITION OF THE CONCEPT OF ASSETS' IN THE ITALIAN LEGISLATION 382 'CULTURAL ..................... W. References 400 ............................................................... Chapter 6 Cultural policy in Italy: Origins, historical development and recent trends As was observed in the preceding chapters, the study of issues relating to cultural policy-making has been dominated, in Italy, by the legal disciplines107.The main consequence of this strong legalistic approach is that the available literature to the cultural policy researcher tends to favour a 'single-issue' format. That is, articles and books tend to focus on a single question, usually concerning the technicalities and the consequences pertaining to the introduction of a new item of legislation, or more generally reforms undergone by the corpus of rules and legislation that make up, effectively, Italian cultural policy. As a result, public policies for the arts and culture as they have been developing in the Italian context over time have not been the object of a systematic or broad-ranging analysis in a way comparable to other main European countries, and the UK in particular. Another consequence of the legal emphasis of research into public policies for the cultural sector is that publications become outdated as soon as new legislative acts are promulgated, and, as chapter 3 has shown, this tends to happen in Italy with uncommon frequency and regularity. 107The predominance of the legal approach to the discussion and practice of cultural policy might indeed be at the root of the apparent lesser emphasis, in the Italian context, on auditing and evaluation. It might be argued that, precisely because of the hold that the legal disciplines have on the Italian debate, this has been less liable to appropriate teachings from the management and business studies disciplines, as has been the case in the UK. -- 219 The field of cultural policy studies is a very young one within Academia and one that has properly taken off only in the last thirty years or so (Kawashima 1999). And yet, a significant body of literature can already be found (in the UK, France, the Scandinavian countries and in many other main European countries) that deals with many aspects of cultural policy making, its historical development and its relationship to the historical, political and cultural contexts of each country. In the UK, a number of texts have indeed become "classics" within the field (see Bennett 2004)108.However, a comprehensive body of literature of a similar nature cannot be found in Italy for the many reasons already explored in the preceding chapters. One of the very few significant 108 So, the cultural policy researcher who wants to devote his or her attention to the historical development of the British Arts Councils can refer, for instance, to the time- honoured work by Hutchinson The Politics of the Arts Council (1982), Pick's Vile Jelly (1991), White's The Arts Council of Great Britain (1975) or the already mentioned article on the Arts Council published by Raymond Williams in 1979. In addition, more recent attempts to delineate the historical development of the bodies involved in distributing public resources to the arts sector have been proffered - among others - by Andrew Sinclair (1995), Hewison (1995), Quinn (1997) and Witts (1998). Bennett (1995) has identified the prominent rationales behind British cultural policies over time, and the available cultural statistics concerning the UK cultural sector have been collected and clearly presented in Selwood (2001), together with a critical discussion of their current use and abuse. Furthermore, a number of individuals who worked in arts administration or held crucial positions within the Arts Council have recorded their experiences in books which have proved extremely useful in aiding the reconstruction not only of the cultural organizations' history, but also of the cultural climate prevailing in Britain at the time of their involvement in arts policy-making. The most illustrious examples are Hugh Jenkin's The Culture Gap (1979), Roy Shaw's The Arts and The People (1987), and John Tusa's Art Matters (1999) (Hugh Jenkins was minister for the Arts from 1974 to 1976; Roy Shaw became Secretary-general of the Arts Council in 1975; John Tusa has been Managing Director of the Barbican Centre in London since 1995). For the historically minded researcher, the already mentioned works by Minihan (1977) and Pearson (1982) represent an invaluable source of information on the origins, in the 19`h century, of the official involvement of the British state in the cultural sphere. This is just a small section of the available literature on cultural policy, but it is representative of the approach to cultural policy research as it has come to flourish in the UK. All the references referred to above are characterized by the view that public policies for culture can only be fully understood when discussed in relation to the broader political, social and cultural circumstances of the country that originated them. Furthermore, many of them explicitly adopt an interdisciplinary approach in order to deal with such a complex and multifaceted subject matter. -- 220 exceptions is represented by the study in two volumes edited by Vincenzo Cazzato that investigates Italian cultural institutions and policies in the 1930s. Cazzato's work was published in 2001 by the official publishing body of the Italian State (the Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato) on behalf of the Ministry for Heritage and Cultural Activities. Despite the central role of the discussion of crucial legal texts, Cazzato and his colleagues also attempt to understand and explain the legal developments in the cultural sphere by systematically placing them in the cultural and political context of Fascist Italy. However, in view of the limited temporal scope of this work, it does not suffice to fill the gap in the extant literature, and it remains an exception to the general approach to the topic prevalent in Italy, rather than the norm. This would seem to point towards the conclusion that the critical remarks made in 1996 by Bianchini et al. are still largely valid today. Bianchini and his co-authors lamented that a problem in the extant literature is "the dearth of critical analysis, historical contextualization, and interpretation which relates cultural policies to party political priorities and strategies, to intellectual debates, and to changes in patterns of cultural consumption" (Bianchini et al. (1996,291). The only significant exception to this dreary scenario is the literature on arts economics which has been flourishing in Italy in the last two or three decades. Examples of the growing interest in the themes of cultural economics are the series of books published by the International Centre for Arts Economic at the Universita' Ca' Foscari in Venice, the Etas and -- 221 the Electa series of books on various aspects of museum management109.Another type of published material of growing popularity is represented by case studies publications, such as the three volumes edited by Antonio Floridia (2000; 2001, and 2003 with Misiti) on various aspects of regional cultural policy in Tuscany. Significantly - and consistently with the popularity of the discipline of cultural economics in Italy - one of only two academic periodical publications especially devoted to the discussion of issues of cultural policy is the journal Economia delta Cultura. The only other relevant periodical publication is the online journal Aedon, which focuses on the analysis of legislation pertinent to the cultural sector. As a