Rock the South founder Nick Morales has criticised Culture Minister Malcolm Paul Agius Galea over his recent comments on creativity, questioning whether the Minister understands the sector he is responsible for
His reaction follows reports in which the Minister described his first four months in office as “traumatic” and argued that artistic creativity should operate within certain “norms”.
In a Facebook post, Mr Morales challenged the Minister's comparison between medicine and art, arguing that the two professions operate on fundamentally different principles.
“In medicine, you work with established standards, evidence and procedures because people's health and lives are at stake. Art, on the other hand, exists to question things, challenge conventions, experiment, provoke, make people uncomfortable and sometimes completely turn established ideas upside down. That's the whole point,” he wrote.
Mr Morales also questioned whether the Minister understood the cultural sector and the challenges faced by artists.
“I don't go around telling doctors how to practise medicine when I have no professional understanding of their field. So why should artists have to sit back and listen to someone who seems to have such a fundamental misunderstanding of what creativity is?”
He expressed concern that the person responsible for supporting the creative sector appeared to view it as a difficult environment to manage.
“What genuinely gives me a bit of a trauma is knowing that the person who should be supporting artists, understanding their struggles, defending their freedom and having their backs is speaking about the creative sector as if it's some strange, troublesome world he's been forced to deal with,” he said.
Mr Morales concluded by urging the Minister to better understand the sector before attempting to define the boundaries of artistic expression.
“Minister, artists don't need to be taught how to be normal. They need a minister who understands why being different matters.”
“Art isn't supposed to behave,” he concluded.
