Beyond any celebration, culture is certainly more relevant and more necessary now than ever, says National Museum of Art of Romania (MNAR) Director General, art critic Erwin Kessler.
'Perhaps National Culture Day is still relevant as a celebration, although festivity generally covers up a lack, it does not indicate fulfilment. If we had a constant and substantial cultural consumption, if our libraries, museums, concert halls and theatres were full, we would not have annual celebrations, but daily joys. And perhaps we would have fewer sinister political adventurers,' Kessler told AGERPRES on the occasion of National Culture Day.
He argues for a 'normal, balanced culture, connected to life and to our time,' which 'takes you out of the black-and-white dialectic.'
'Beyond any celebration, culture is certainly more relevant and more necessary now than ever. Not triumphalist, isolationist and backward-looking culture, nor demagogic and free-market rhetoric culture. Not the cultural tunnel with a single entrance and a single exit - hatred - into which extremisms of all orientations push us, but normal, balanced culture, connected to life and to our time, culture capable of giving greater solidity to judgments and a stronger critique of prejudices. Culture takes you out of the black-and-white dialectic that has suffocated us since communism, even before communism. Culture can protect against dangerous deviations because it offers diversity, multiple angles of understanding for major issues,' said the MNAR director.
The lack of culture keeps people captive to ready-made ideas and slogans, the critic underlines, because an extremely aggressive, rudimentary and resentful culture is flourishing precisely now, one that does not feed on poverty and lack of freedom, as is often claimed, but on a lack of basic education, which causes the fragile cultural graft to produce poison, not pearls.
Even more serious and typical for us, Kessler maintains, is the historical fact that some of the gravest political errors have been made by people of culture who reached positions of authority or influence.
He criticised what he called the 'recent social and political validation of some malevolent clowns,' which he said was possible 'because of the assimilation of culture with imposture, due to a lack of discernment caused by chronic and severe underfunding of culture, reduced to triumphalism and festivity.'
'The political abyss on whose edge we stand is, paradoxically, after decades of economic and technological growth and development, opened up by seemingly harmless (in)culture, by that small and rotten stump that can overturn the great cart of general progress. The current political crisis is a cultural crisis. There is an enormous gap between genuine elites and the real people. In the absence of everyday, calm and diverse culture, the false culture of extremist, aberrant exceptionalism can bring down the whole of society. And development will not protect us from collapse,' the MNAR director general said.
Since 15 January 2011, Romanian culture has had an official national celebration, set on the anniversary of the poet Mihai Eminescu. National Culture Day was initiated by academician Eugen Simion, who was president of the Romanian Academy at the time, and was enacted by the Romanian Parliament in 2010. Now in its sixteenth edition, National Culture Day is celebrated both in the country and abroad.
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