For a change, I will take the advice of my detractors and stick to the arts, which even they admit I am just about intellectually fit to do with aplomb.

An electoral programme that promises to bring the arts closer to the people is music to my ears- Kenneth Zammit Tabona

I compared and contrasted what both parties had to say in their electoral programmes about the arts and found that, inexplicably, the Nationalist Party has no notion that modern art and contemporary art are related but completely distinct and that it is still encouraging artists to exhibit in embassies which the Arts Council has been battling against for years.

These dinosaurs made up two of the four or five odd paragraphs that the PN saw fit to outline in its plan for the next five years.

Also mentioned was an all encompassing arts academy in Qormi and the restoration of the fortresses of St Elmo and St Angelo as cultural and touristic venues.

Having put ‘culture’ in the search box I found pages and pages of planned, ongoing and completed restoration works, which is all very good, however, also mentioned was Villa Francia, which, as far as I know, had been fully restored four years ago as the Prime Minister’s residence. Restoration works are admirable but do not do a thing to encourage the active support and promotion of the arts; nor do ghettoised academies in the middle of nowhere. As for those two fortresses, Minister Austin Gatt’s inaugural speech in Republic Street, Valletta, when the Piano Project was launched, still rankles.

The more I flipped around mychoice.pn the more frustrated I became. It looked as if the whole thing was a cut-and-paste exercise. I could not find anything about the professionalisation of art practitioners or about the fundamental infrastructural changes needed to be put in place before V18.

When, last Wednesday, the Labour Party’s electoral programme was launched I immediately homed in on section 13 – arts, culture and creativity – to find that, yes, the PL had more than grasped the fundamental difference between modern art and contemporary art and are planning to establish two distinct museums and, among other things, had formally acknowledged the fact that our orchestra, the Malta Philharmonic, desperately needs a performing space after 18 years of nomadic existence.

As I read paragraph after paragraph it became increasingly evident that the programme was extremely well researched and would provide a practical blueprint to indicate the way forward.

I was also gratified to read that a PL Administration would help and encourage artists to participate in international events like the Edinburgh Festival and the Venice Biennale besides consolidating festivals like the Jazz Festival and the Valletta International Baroque Festival to reinforce Malta’s uniqueness as a cultural venue.

Comparisons, we are told, are odious. However, when faced with these programmes, what does one conclude?

To someone like me, the arts are of paramount importance. They are my life but, far more importantly, I had, long ago, made it my life’s mission to encourage and to urge people not to be afraid of them. Yes, I am being very serious.

I started reviewing music for this august newspaper 40 years ago and soon realised that in those days the arts were kept in some sort of holy of holies, a pastime reserved for the elite.

Because the opera house was never rebuilt, the culture of opera, always the most populist form of culture, had died a lingering death and only the more exalted forms of abstract music were available. Music reviews were highly technical and off-putting.

I am proud to say that I put a stop to all that and changed the practice around to writing reviews under my own name, which had never been done before. My predecessor wrote as Our Music Critic!

The objective in my writing, from the very beginning, was to bring the arts closer to the people and to educate and uplift while convincing those who shied off entering the hallowed portals of the Manoel Theatre that one need not ‘understand’ music to appreciate it and, even more importantly, enjoy it.

Therefore, an electoral programme that promises to do just that is music to my ears. From what I read it is obvious that the PL believes that art and culture reflect the standards of a country. The programme, although extensive, is not exhaustive but the gist of it is that the PL appears committed to raise the standard of excellence.

The PN, I am afraid, did not even bother to declare that it would be attempting to beat its own track record, which, in many cases, has been admirable. That is tragic.

There have been many initiatives and projects that make eminent sense but, oddly enough, the PN electoral programme does not even mention them.

When I put Malta Arts Fund into the search engine I was confronted with promises of hefty grants for the digital gaming industry and that only artists who live or practise in Valletta will be given fiscal advantages, which, considering that the then much fanfared VAT reduction to five per cent on works of art was, in January 2012, put back to 18 per cent without a squeak, is, I am sure you will agree, a trifle discriminatory.

What I could not find in either electoral programme was any reference to the ancillary Piano Project, the so called ‘roofless theatre’, which is as much a theatre as St John’s Square or Piazza Regina and not half as attractive!

I will remind everyone that Bernard Plattner, from Renzo Piano’s office, declared on Bondì Plus that it was possible to have an orchestral auditorium on that footprint, so all is not lost yet.

This travesty will serve no purpose and will, in future, rebuke us as it descends into an even worse ruin than it once was.

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