Austin Camilleri’s newly laid out monument in front of Queen Victoria’s monument in Valletta is the latest representation of the government’s and the Maltese people’s will to appease itself with artistic and cultural mediocrity. Another symbol of our mediocrity, and that we are the type of people that put up with everything.
Austin Camilleri has been very provocative with his new monument in front of Queen Victoria’s monument in Valletta, and he achieved his aim of getting many Maltese to talk about his “art”. His project is provocative for provocation’s sake, so Austin Camilleri deserves a very honest headline for doing this trick. He has come out much better as a marketing manager than an artist.
Artists like Austin Camilleri have had a lot of exposure thanks to the Labour government’s will to appease artists by buying their horrible sculptures. Since the new Labour government entered office in 2013, the sculptures and public artworks erected since then are horrible, to say the least, and infinitely ugly.
The ugliness and the pseudo-artistic trash being concocted, actually quite fit the destructive and chaotic landscape of the Islands, so all is in order if art has to reflect the current state of society – but that’s not necessarily art’s task.
I have always wished to see Queen Victoria replaced by a monument of a Maltese such as ?an Anton Vassallo (Malta’s first enlightened intellectual, legal author of the Code de Rohan, consultant to the Grand Master, and revolutionary). However, such a replacement should come with an equivalent artistic beauty because Queen Vitoria’s sculpture is actually very beautiful in artistic terms. It was created by a Sicilian sculpture named Giuseppe Valente in the 1890s. Sculptures today don’t need to be in the same style of that of the 1890s, but we neither should be accepting more mediocrity in our public spaces.
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