When we met the boss of Google Arts & Culture, Amit Sood, told us that “museums will still exist for a long time.” Despite Googleand other tech companies, have long been digitizing art to make it more accessible far from their rooms. The problem, if anything, is to fill these same museums with a young audienceused to having experiences on social networks and already projected, ideally, to the metaverso.
“It is important to experience a museum in person – he told us on the occasion of the partnership between Google Arts & Culture and the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano – because you can look at numerous video sui social network but you will never have the same sensations you experience live “. Sood, however, agrees that new technologies and new forms of storytelling who inhabit the web, in particular i video short for 60 seconds, they constitute “an essential hook” for the museums and cultural institutes that intend attract kids.
He also understood it Christian Collu, director since 2015 of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art which is located in Rome, one step away from the greenery of Villa Borghese. Collu, like many other museum directors before her, has signed an agreement with Google Arts & Culture, and in particular with YouTube, to revitalize and expand digital engagement with the very young.
The initiative is called Make It Short and is a YouTube ‘series’ created by ten young female creators. Every day at 2 pm, from today 23 June until 10 July, the creators chosen for this project will tell, in a pop key, 20 masterpieces from the museum’s collections using their own YouTube Shortsthe platform function that allows you to create 60 second clip directly with your smartphone.
The creators are Basic Gaia, Federica Mutti, mrtndamex, Lucrezia Oddone, Gaia Lapasini, Carolina Chiari, Ginevra Iorio, Pitta, Eleonora Tani and Valeria De Angelis and Maria Chiara Cicolani of Eterobasiche. The videos were shot by Carlotta Marrucci with Marta Antonioli and Nicola Baraglia, and are enriched with animated illustrations by Martì Guixé, Catalan designer, artist and curator.
The first short, signed Basic Gaia, is already online. During the presentation of the project, which took place in the War room of the National Gallery, we had the opportunity to preview others. The conversational tone e you can find them ‘social’ sometimes they have fun, others, on the other hand, leave a little dumbfounded, one gets the impression that the joke is being sought at all costs. And this is not meant to be a project standup comedyit’s clear.
Make It Short, Basic Gaia tells “The Three Ages” by Gustav Klimt
Nevertheless many movies work and will work, among young people, because their gaze is different, we do not understand it but it is directed ‘elsewhere’, even in the case of art. Vera Gheno, sociolinguist who wrote a book chosen by the Ministry of Education, in these days of Maturity, to give shape to the topical trace of the Italian test. “If we use our mental schemes on the youngest – Gheno told us – we will do nothing but perpetuate a tug-of-war with the new generations. We have to understand their elsewhere “.
The character / The interview
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by Pier Luigi Pisa
And that elsewhere, they look at a canvas of Fontanais very close to the thinking of the man in the street, which has been wondering about those ‘cuts’ since time immemorial. And so the creator on duty observes them, concentrated, and then she says, in Roman dialect: “What is there for a tajo to do?”. And even if you have thought it a thousand times, and you expect it a little, smile. But when the girl wonders what is behind the canvas, behind those cracks, then yes that the ‘innovative’ language hits the mark, with a few words it drags you into the Gallery, into that room. Put simply, as Collu and his colleagues wish, it makes you want to learn more.
Why the risk of trivializing art, for many, it is high, with such ironic videos of a few seconds. Video in which Anna Zborowska, Modigliani’s oil on canvas, is juxtaposed with a selfie. Does it make someone turn up their noses? Likely. Does it work with young audiences? Much more likely.
What is certain is that Google and Italian museums they have the same mission at the moment: “The idea of speaking with new languages”. They are words of Massimo OsannaDirector General of Italian Museums, who welcomes the data on entered after Covid: “Young people return to art galleries and more generally to places of culture”.
On the same wave frequency Luca Forlin, responsible for Europe, the Middle East and Africa of Google’s strategic partnerships in the news and information sector, who states: “Shorts are the creative language of contemporaneity. There is nothing that cannot be touched by the innovation of shorts “. And then he too gives an important fact: “One and a half billion people use YouTube Shorts every month”.
Together with the shorts, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art will propose from 12 July, also online, too the second season of Short video story of (almost) everything by title The Important Thing (About Movies, Architecture and Literature): nine long-format episodes with Carlotta Vagnoli, Sabrina Efionayi, Valeria Della Valle, Ema Stokholma, Irene Vetere, Elisa Fuksas, Francesca Perani, Federico De Matteis and Simone Bove.