Crime dramas are among the most popular TV programs. Wouldn’t it be interesting if they could help get people interested in visual art? My musings on this started when I read what may have been a throw-away line or may yet come to pass.
In mid-January, at a press conference disclosing 2009 art crime statistics, Franceso Maria Giro, an under-secretary in Italy’s Ministry of Culture suggested that the activities of the carabinieri’s art-and-antiquities squad would make a great TV drama. The idea was reported as a tiny item in the Italian press, put on Facebook, and then picked up in a few sentences by The Art Newspaper (February issue), where I first read it.
Giro proposed a TV show that would be fictionalized, but based on fact and made with the help of experts. He thinks it would encourage Italians to place more value on their heritage. I think it might also teach viewers a thing or two about art and antiquities, painlessly.
Giro said he had already discussed his idea with Sandro Bondi, the culture minister, and that he would approach RAI, the state-owned broadcaster.
Heaven knows there’s plenty of fodder. Here’s an open:
…A report arrives on the desk of Col. Giovanni Pastore, second in command of a military police unit charged with protecting Italy’s cultural patrimony. The few pages list everything from antique watches to Renaissance paintings that were either ripped off or recovered the day before.
Robbers entered a church in Ascoli Piceno and left with two ancient wood pews, the better for making fake antique furniture. A burglar at a church farther north in Novara had just enough time to break the wooden arm off of a baby Jesus, as it lay cradled in the arms of the Virgin Mary…. Meanwhile, at a family villa…thieves stole off into the night with a cache of marble statues. On a bright note, more than two dozen sculptures, antiques and paintings, including a 16th-century triptych of the Holy Family, were recovered just one month after their theft from a villa outside Milan.
Not included in the report were the holes likely dug the night before by tombaroli, the grave-robbers notorious for busting open Etruscan tombs…
That’s how a 2006 article about the art squad in the Wall Street Journal began. Italy then had 300 police at work on these cases, plus volunteer archaeologists, professional and amateur. Yet, “Between 1970 and 2005…845,838 objects were reported stolen, while less than a third of that number were recovered and only 4,159 arrests were made.”
Compelling TV about the visual arts has always been scarce (something I wrote about in 1997, perhaps too positively then, and it’s worse now), but Giro’s idea is different.
It might work, even in the U.S.