Renzo Piano's earrings

Arabs have a bitter saying: God gives earrings to those who have no ears. If Renzo Piano's plans for Valletta are realised, the city will have a new pair - make that three - of sparkling earrings. But do we have ears?

That is not an existential question about national achievements. Nor is it an imitation of the querulous attitude displayed by 19th-century English travellers towards Italy ("lovely country, pity it's inhabited by Italians"). It is a material question about the investment, infrastructure and human resources needed to make sure the quality of what happens in Mr Piano's spaces will be congruent with the quality of the architecture.

So it is a question about the administrative processes in which the new city gate, Parliament and the open-air theatre are to be embedded: the routine management and creative use of the spaces. It is about pathways: how to draw people to the threshold, get them to inhabit the space and then to leave, ideally with a good story to tell.

Obviously, the respective processes for gate, Parliament and theatre are different. The first depends on effective transport reform, the second on us and who we put there, and the theatre on... On what and whom, exactly?

Something odd happened during the debate on whether the Opera House site should host a contemporary arts centre. On both sides, most people spoke as though the decision to build an arts centre was like a decision to build a new school or perhaps a second university. It was a debate about one institution and its maintenance; on whether we could financially afford one, or culturally afford to be without it.

If that was really how the question ought to have been framed, then the answer was a no-brainer: We cannot financially afford such a place. Even with good management, similar institutions in larger cities than our city-state, with a larger potential market, still depend on generous subsidies and charitable giving. And the going remains very tough.

However, the real analogy is not with building a school - despite the ministerial twinning of culture with education and the mad obsession with having cultural events "send out a message". Building an arts centre is like building a Freeport.

It would have been a decision to develop an industry: a proper culture industry, requiring the government to pull out all the stops as it did when it decided to develop maritime and financial services.

Or indeed the tourist industry. For, since the local market is too small to support routine, high-quality productions, developing a culture industry means seriously exploring the international market for patrons (instead of arguing over the number of opera buffs in Malta) and the packages and marketing needed to get them over. The economics of culture would have overlapped with the economics of tourism.

That would have told us if the ambition was plausible. To fulfil it, however, the professional production of culture would have had to be tackled. To get the events, one has to have the trained personnel - the visual artists, the stage performers, the musicians... the audio and lighting engineers, etc. Which would have meant serious institutional reform in how, for example, art and music are taught.

Putting the matter in this way might sound as though I am trying hard to make it sound impossible to achieve. Actually, my agenda has three different points to push.

First, it is possible to achieve a thorough reform of the schools of the arts. The government has long been discussing plans relating to separate artistic disciplines.

Second, it is desirable that these reforms are enacted as quickly as possible.

But, alas, third, I am not at all sure the government's politicians appreciate the extent of the effort needed. In responding to requests for an arts centre, the government's early reply was: "But we have the Mediterranean Conference Centre already". That is, it chose to say the one thing - from a choice of more defensible retorts - that disqualified it from being taken seriously as a promoter of high culture. The MCC's acoustics are too mediocre to produce fine music.

It is not just the government. Ham acting fills our TV screens. Some Malta-trained dancers have achieved fine things abroad but, back at the ranch, parents continue to fork out good money for ballet tutus that are a mockery of the real thing. We may have Joseph Calleja and Miriam Gauci but, when they sing in Malta, do not bank on the audio engineering doing them justice.

The list could go on but the essential point is this: In choosing to go for the open-air theatre, the government has settled the function of the opera-house site. But it has not settled whether that function is going to be fulfilled well.

If anything, the Piano design, together with the government's commitment to regenerate Valletta as a cultural space, has made it more urgent that the human and administrative resources in the cultural sector are vigorously developed. Otherwise, we risk being all earrings and no ears.

ranierfsadni@europe.com