Valentina Toscano: "Having managerial skills to manage art events is essential."

Starting in 2022, the 24ORE Business School has been involved as a community partner in the Videocities 2022 project: an experiment conceived by Anica President Francesco Rutelli, with the artistic direction of Francesco Dobrovich, to be held July 20-24. The goal is to bring the film and audiovisual industries into dialogue with new digital creative experiences. The former Gazometro in Rome, an important example of industrial archaeology located in the Ostiense district, has been chosen for its fifth edition, where to deal with the digital and ecological transition. During the event there will be lectures, meetings, direct, prizes, but also appointments designed for children, and in addition space for comparison to increase the skills, reputation and network of contacts of all participants that already in the last edition counted 627 matchmaking applications, including 50 between local and international companies and professionals. Windows on Art devotes two focuses to this event, with two interviews with Valentina Toscano, teaching coordinator of the full-time master’s program “Economics and Management for Art and Culture,” and Rita Monaciliuni, teaching coordinator of the full-time master’s program “Management of Audiovisual Product for Entertainment.” We publish today an interview with Valentina Toscano, who talks about the importance of management skills in the art world and how the job market is evolving in this area, with particular reference to digital. The interview is by Ilaria Baratta.

IB. How important is it to have managerial skills in the management of art and cultural events? Can you give some practical examples?

VT. Having managerial skills in arts and cultural event management is essential. We can call it an essential requirement for working today. The title of the master’s degree gives a good idea of this necessity: linking and making a system between the more humanistic-cultural aspect and the more economic-managerial aspect. These are precisely the two supporting pillars on which the master’s degree stands and which it wants to bring into synergy. It is no longer conceivable, or even permissible, for example, for a curator or museum director not to know how to read a budget or not to have knowledge about the economic and financial sustainability of a project. Of course, then there will be the specialists in numbers, but it is important that new cultural planners and managers have this mindset, sensitivity and integrated vision because it is only with such a systemic approach that projects can come to fruition and, above all, can be useful and have a virtuous impact on the cultural ecosystem.

The world of work is changing: it is moving toward greater digitization, including in the cultural sphere. How is the cultural sector evolving in this regard?

The technological transformation has been like a tsunami that has swept through all areas of work and all aspects of our daily lives. The pandemic has been an enzyme that has incredibly sped up this process that was already in place. In the cultural sector the digital wave has been a breath of modernity and innovation, not only in technology but also in content and, above all, in processes. So much has happened in these two years: from video games to online auctions, from NFTs to cryptocurrencies, from the digitization of archives to museum web radios, from AR/VR installations to immersive techniques of exhibition fruition, from access on Tik Tok of the main Italian museums to gamification as a cultural strategy. Not just a list of facts, but overall an epochal turning point that allowed a democratization of the artistic and cultural res, a renewal of the language with which this sector used to relate to the public and other productive industries. For too long we had been limited to interfacing only among the famous insiders, remaining plastered in an arid cultural classicism and a myopia of visions. With digitization, on the other hand, we have finally opened up to healthy and stimulating intermingling and contamination from other multidisciplinary fields that can provide that extra something that the art world has always lacked; and vice versa those sectors that are very often too vertical and twisted on themselves, thanks to art, can acquire that sensitivity capable of tickling the emotional strings and conceive of their data (and by data I also refer to users) as a summation of emotions, values, thoughts and variables that are not entirely manageable and traceable to cold algorithms, fortunately.

What are the most in-demand digital skills in the world of work today, particularly in marketing?

In a world that is increasingly phygital, keeping up with technology is inevitable. Knowing the infinite potential of digital tools, having a smart approach and a sensitivity to multilayer sustainability are some of the main ingredients for implementing the digital transition and making innovation in the real world and beyond. While technical and technological skills are learned and acquired by studying, doing, experimenting and putting one’s hands in the dough day by day (learning by doing); on the other hand, I feel like saying that today the skill that can make one more competitive in the market is that of Content Management: identifying, processing, managing quality content and knowing how to transmit it, share it with an audience as transversal as possible with a high level of engagement. In an era of information overloading" in which we are immersed, knowing how to synthesize and select quality content, dense with meaning and significance, charged with innovation and creativity, can make the difference in the expression of oneself as a professional and also in the communication of the missions, visions and values of those who are cultural actors (institutions, museums, galleries, foundations, auction houses, artists, etc.).

What will the future of art and culture look like with the increasing use of digital? What pros and cons do you think digital will bring to the world of culture and management organization?

I hope that this digital revolution will lead to social and cultural innovation, but not to total automation. Art and culture, for me, are and I would like them to remain emotional facts, emotional facts for which we cannot forget about the subject who sees, enjoys, experiences art and culture, and around whom the whole system revolves. I would like to think that we will continue to have the straight bar pointing in the direction of a digital humanism where we do not lose our focus on the uniqueness of people by combining it with a sensitivity to a digital, innovative and systemically sustainable approach. I sincerely hope that Digital remains a means and not an end. One frontier that I see very exciting on the horizon is Data science for Arts & Culture. Already some artists, as always avant-garde and gifted with an early sensibility, have been working on it but it would be nice if it were implemented as a strategic design strategy for the cultural industry, both in creative and managerial processes, targeting both external audiences and the people who eat with culture.

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