“The biggest crisis we have in #Malta right now is where to put monti hawkers! It’s not about higher taxes, higher bills or standard of living,” tweeted Glenn Bedingfield last week.

This tweet I think, sums up Malta’s most serious problem. We dismiss a cultural ‘crisis’ as a ‘ċuċata’, a triviality. We tend to think of any complaints to do with art, heritage and culture as ‘qrid’ (whines).

But the truth is that the standard of living goes beyond material comfort. It’s also to do with wealth of knowledge. And our society will start changing for the better only when attitudes to culture start changing and we start considering cultural heritage as our most prized possession.

Chris Gatt, who managed St James Cavalier for a decade-and-a-half years, told Times of Malta in an interview last year: “A country with little culture has little chance of strong employment. Creativity generates innovation, energy and new ideas. Culture is education; it is a life skill.”

So much so that in several European countries, among them France, the Culture Ministry is one of the most revered.

Here in Malta, culture is still seen as an appendix, an aside, a demotion almost, or a perk to get the best tickets for Eurovision, panto and the Joseph Calleja concert.

MPs who have culture under their wing do not see how privileged they are because they single-handedly have the possibility of reshaping the future of the way Maltese people think and stamp out, once and for all, the belief that culture is about that darned eight-pointed cross.

Last week, economist (and playwright) Joseph Zahra wrote how despite an apparent recent boom in art exhibitions and music events, the quality has remained, with few exceptions, mediocre and amateurish. “We are back on the road of populism and traditionalism with fear of breaking boundaries.”

Culture gives us a soul. And a crisis of the soul is not any less worrying than a crisis of the pocket

Art is really about breaking rules – but not here. Maltese artists are rarely willing to voice their thoughts. Whenever the country is discussing a cultural issue and journalists try to get feedback, the most common answer will be: “No, I’d rather not comment.”

What happens then is that the voices of mediocrity, louder and boomier, win the arguments. University dean Alex Torpiano admitted as much in Times of Malta last week: “Perhaps it is time to become more vociferous and to insist that things are done properly. Valletta belongs to us all.”

Sadly, cultural ignorance rules the island. And I’m not pointing my finger at the hawkers or their ilk, here. I point my fingers at people who mock hawkers but they themselves are in positions of much greater responsibility and do worse things.

I have, for example, seen people – who should know better – throw away invaluable and irreplaceable early 20th century documents because they are culturally ignorant.

We love pointing our fingers at the stereotypical uncultured person “huh, hunters are stupid!” and we don’t bother looking in the mirror. Now, you may or may not agree with the use of the Renzo Piano space (the Parliament, the open theatre), but you cannot deny the beauty of the architectural project: walking into Valletta through the city gate is now an experience of awe.

Finally our eyes can feast on an architectural space in which there is no fountain sprouting water from the ground, no wrought iron pregnant windows, no peristyle columns, no farmhouse fanali. It is the injection of taste. This is just the very sense of beauty and space that we needed to uplift the city.

It makes me very sad that there are people who do not see this. Sad because their soul is truly missing out on beauty and God knows, in this crammed island of ours, we need that.

“Beauty is an acquired taste,” Gatt told me earlier last week. “Beauty is like wine. You are not born to love wine but the more you are exposed to it, the more you read up on it and the more you try it, the more your tastes become refined.” If all your life all you’ve drunk is table wine, there is no way you can appreciate the finer wines.

And that is why artists need to speak up – to ensure that everyone has a chance to taste a Rhone or a St Emilion. Exposure to culture and to beauty is the only way we can get rid of our mhux xorta attitude of anything goes, which is our malady.

It is also the best tool to get rid of our perception of life as one constant competition with the neighbour: PL vs PN, każin vs każin, red vs blue, Aurora vs Astra and so on.

When we expose ourselves to cultural events, we slowly start learning to sift the wheat from the chaff, discard the ugly and uphold beauty. That is the foundation for critical analysis, as opposed to the Xarabank analysis (something pops in my mind and I just say it).

In conclusion, I’ll go back to Bedingfield, who I know is truly appreciative of wine and therefore knows the value of beauty.

Culture gives us a soul. And a crisis of the soul is not any less worrying than a crisis of the pocket.

krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti