All is not quiet on the arts front.
According to a report yesterday, Arts Council chairman Albert Marshall vetoed the decision of an international evaluation panel tasked with picking the curatorial team for the Malta pavilion at the Biennale and then replaced the panel with a new one, which selected the candidate he had favoured.
Then, responding to a request for further comment, Marshall said: “I’ll be doing my damnedest to ensure that next year will be the last time, until I’m around at least, that Maltese artists are provided with a platform for Venice. Now I understand why Malta was absent from the Biennale for 17 bloody years.”
There you have, in one iconic reply, arrogance and a complete disregard of the most elementary rules for behaviour by public figures.
Albert (Bertu) Marshall is, of course, one of the greats in Maltese theatre with such television serials as Il-Madonna tac-Coqqa to his name. That teleserial broke new ground in Maltese television viewership. Even before that, he was one of the leaders of the Maltese new wave in literature and the arts that followed on the attainment of Malta’s independence in the mid-1960s.
That first wave was followed by many others but the first wave, or what remained of it, still had a special aura around it.
It is inevitable all around the world, that the arts, in a wide sense, shared frontiers with politics. While in other countries this tends to be politics in a wide sense of the word, in Malta this inevitably falls into our brand of partisan politics.
I say that while this was not so evident in the PN years, though it existed too, it is right there and in your face in Labour years. The 1970s and the 1980s saw a rather different brand of so-called arts come to the fore, the Wardakanta type while the Bertu Marshall group was sidelined.
But when Labour was again in government in 2013, the new administration went back to the Marshall 1960s group and gave them all the space they wanted – managing PBS, heading the Arts Council, you name it. Not, and this is crucial, doing what they are best as, as directors, etc, but as arts managers, which they have no idea of.
(In the meantime, the rich inheritance of the PN years such as St James Cavalier and even the Roofless Theatre, have had their name changed and given a different approach so as to be practically unrecognizable.)
The culmination of all this came together in the Valletta as the Capital City of Culture event. I am constantly surprised the year is two-thirds done and people seem apathetic about it all. And yet the National Museum of Fine Arts (I dislike the new name Muza that has been summarily and arbitrarily chosen) is still closed to the public which is thus being deprived of the view of the masterpieces of Maltese art in the past.
To be sure, it is not V18’s fault that St John’s Cathedral Museum is still closed, and I am not clear in my mind about the state of the new Museum of Contemporary Art.
As for the so-called V18 celebrations, these have decidedly been in the WardaKanta mode which seems to be ingrained in the Labour DNA.
Back to Venice Biennale and Bertu’s OTT reaction. Unfortunately, the newspaper report did not tell us who the originally chosen artist was and who is the one who will be sent instead. The comment space provided us with a photo of our last participation, which included a festa pavaljun, among other items.
By taking upon himself the responsibility of deciding who to exclude and who to include in such an august arts international event, if the story is true, Marshall made the worst of decisions – one which shows such positions should not be left in the hands of the non-managers. That is precisely why in such matters committees are appointed.
By blowing his top the way he did, Bertu Marshall showed he had unwittingly put himself under pressure. I prefer to remember the young lion of Il-Madonna tac-Coqqa.
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