In the framework of our current campaign "Art and Sustainability", our team held an exciting and rich conversation with Hypercritic CEO Alessandro Avataneo, their editors-in-chief Giulia Avataneo and Clara Gastaldi. Hypercritic is an online platform connecting books with music, poetry with movies or even exhibitions, into one shared digital space. The organization strives to improve distance education, creating curated learning paths to empower readers by turning their opinion into structured knowledge.
1. About the organization
Alessandro: We are officially a magazine but also an innovative start-up with social commitment. All the profit we make eventually will be re-invested in people. Particularly, we want to invest in the young generation of writers. I invested personal funds to kick start the company, but only after 6 months we received an award by the European Cultural Foundation. They were the firsts to realize that we are an imaginative solution to the aftermath of the pandemic. Thanks to their grant we can pay for the basic expenses of 2021. As you can imagine Hypercritic is expensive as each article requires a long process. Our contributors write from their home cities, then articles get processed by different editors who integrate the subject with other works in order to create connections. This offers a reading experience different from other magazines. Some schools use it to teach because you can research and find connections between 10 paintings in 10 different museums, thanks to links that sort them by color or by subject. These links created by our team present endless paths.
2. What is the main mission?
Alessandro: The main mission is “Turn Opinion into Knowledge”. I do not know if you agree with us but today everybody write their opinion without any background knowledge. So, we would like to gather the best experts to speak a common language, so to help our readers turn their opinions into structural knowledge in a way they can learn and develop their taste, to understand why they like something and why they do not like something else.
Giulia: It is a tool of empowerment basically.
Alessandro: A tool of empowerment and self-empowerment. We thought - how can we use technology whilst respecting diversity? Because usually a critic speaks for himself and does not consider the diversity of his audience. Hypercritic gives you the tools to pull the information together and choose your own specific path of knowledge. That is the revolution we are doing.
3. How big are you?
Alessandro: As a cultural company in Italy, we are large sized but for our objective it is quite little. We want to gather 1,000 experts from all over, so that we can fill the temperature of the culture in each country. So, we need people in Korea, Iceland, Yemen and South Africa. Because when you live there you know what is happening, it's your perspective from your own country. For example, I love Bong Joon-ho, the Korean film director, I think I know a lot about his movies, still I am looking forward to having a film critic from South Korea who could teach me things that I might have missed in his movies. This meeting between different cultures is the real value of Hypercritic.
Giulia: In this way, he or she will help us find the new and the next Bong Joon-ho. Why not?
Alessandro: Yes, absolutely.
Interrelating art/culture with sustainability in Europe
5.There is a real emphasis on reaction and feeling metrics proposed on your website, why do you propose such a palette of emotions to measure artistic experiences?
Alessandro: How can you measure something that is emotional? That is subjective. Our belief was that it is possible to transfer a subjective experience into a universal evaluation. This is my job as a director, I must tell stories that touch people’s heart. For example, in a movie you are looking for a quality of image, an intensity of emotions, for unique characters and to dive into another World. David Lynch and Steven Spielberg’s movies are vastly different. Spielberg is more universal and accessible, Lynch more specific and extreme. Various aspects are developed in a movie, through our infographic it’s possible to measure some from one to five. With this infographic you can decide in a second whether it catches your interest and if it’s worth spending time reading the article. That is the idea. To save time. Time is precious.
6. On an interview given to the European Cultural Foundation, Giulia said: “With Hypercritic, readers can develop their taste, understand reality, and become advocates for change.” How do you concretely relate the knowledge of arts and culture to an understanding of reality and the desire to act for change?
Giulia: That is our next step. We plan to introduce a section titled ‘Change’ where we will gather stories of activism to inspire people to take action to defend their values. So, we plan to gather various experiences, from the fields of the environment to the protection of cultural heritage and give them a platform on the digital space. We are also preparing to approach UNESCO with the whole project and we hope to have them on board as soon as possible.
7. Were there challenges that impaired the platform to contribute to environmental and social sustainability?
Alessandro: As we do not have a business model, we rely heavily from institutions and foundations. We need lots of money to make things grow but we are not using any advertisement. If we get advertisement, we would have to push content and the information will neither be authentic nor free anymore. Gladly, during our poetic marathon (Hypercriticpoethon 2021), the prime minister of New Zealand and of Iceland endorsed our initiative because we send political messages through beauty and give importance to culture and art. We hope to find interest in the United Nations because we share the same values. We are asking for their support; it will not be economic but an institutional one. Then we will be looking for funds from different private foundations and public institutions. This is our main challenge now.
Giulia: I agree. The main challenge so far was fundraising. On the other hand, the most rewarding part is that several institutions such as yours get in touch to know our project. Many authors we did not know personally wrote to us to contribute because they feel free to express their knowledge. So, this was the platform they were waiting for. That is the most satisfying aspect of the job so far.
Alessandro: That is wonderful. That gives us propose to go on.
8. How is your organization contributing to the strengthening of a European sentiment, i.e., affection to EU values, traditions, common language and heritage?
Alessandro: These values are deeply anchored in my life. I worked in almost all European countries. I have a degree in International Relations. I am also from the Erasmus generation, we were the first ones to travel all around Europe. I have friends who build families with people from other European countries. It’s really a big experiment of integration. The European Union is the longest place for peace and integration in human history, after 500 years of war we now have 70 years of peace. This is the thing that we must preserve for the future. We want to bring these values and to make them universal. The German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, wrote that the only way to achieve peace on the global level is through culture. We are idealist, but still grounded. Otherwise, you get dangerous things such as nationalism or the Brexit, which threaten what Europe have built to stay together. We really think initiatives like Hypercritic can help European integration on a political level because we bring people together. We learn from each other, through the diversity in unity. In our contract we specify that anyone writing for us understands the convention for human rights. We commit not to send messages of hate and division, but of unity, integration and dialogue.
Model art’s impact on sustainability
The research for our "Art and Sustainability" campaign is based on a theoretical framework that support the idea that art and culture can impact positively sustainable development through three different dimensions : the instrumental, the semi-instrumental and the intrinsic. This model is based on two articles from Moldavanova (2014, 2020). Hereunder, we ask questions classifying the organization's intentions under the specificity of the model.
9. How many people are employed ? From which professional fields the collaborators come from?
Giulia: We have 70 people mostly women, young students and young professionals. Everybody gets paid for any written piece. We have mainly humanists, so artist writers, journalists, lecturers. We also have a diversity of professionals from the fields of arts, culture, media, sports amongst others.
11. Hypercritic is presented “as an observatory workshop and trendsetter that brings together content, people, and institutions.” Do you see artistic and cultural institutions as a source of social value ?
Alessandro: During the lock down, every museum and theater was closed but Hypercritic was open. With Hypercritic we design a place where the audience can meet the institution online. For example, you are in Paris but you have tree hours. You enter Hypercritic and you can look up what to visit in three hours, this could be true for Paris or Bologna, in Miami or New York...So its really a tool to improve you life even if you have ten minutes to spare. We also plan to make it interactive, now Hypercritic is in the sense that you can choose the kind of experience between the eight parameters ‘easy/hard’, ‘fast/slow’, ‘dirty/clean’ and ‘big/slow’.
12. You also mention that you want to give tools to teachers looking for inspiration or for cultural institutions looking for new ways of engaging their audience. Are your missions to educate more sustainably ?
Giulia: Regarding the education part, we have few teachers who have used Hypercritic as a tool to teach their lessons during lock down. Since everything went digital, Hypercritic has been used to create paths that explain to students many aspects of culture. Its a matter of inclusion and innovation as well. Sometimes in Italy, teachers don't have many innovative tools to teach online, so this is a great way we think, at least teachers have told us it has been useful.
13. Do you consider your organization engaging civil society through democratic values such as freedom of speech, an independent justice etc. ?
Giulia: I think the poetic marathon is the prefect example because we managed a straight-forward campaign which was asking people to share their favorite poem written by a woman. We were able to engage our public and we had a huge participation. So we really spread beauty and poetry for a whole week.
Alessandro: You can find all the videos on Youtube. It’s an unprecedented archive about poetry written by women from Ancient Greece to Amanda Gorman. There, you can find an ancient Egyptian poem read by the director of the Egyptian Museum in Turin (watch video under!). So the knowledge we produce is available but it takes a lot of work and money. It is a big effort because each content is carefully curated. If you type Black Lives Matter on Hypercritic, you get a list of all the movies, books and art pieces that are related to the topic.There is a real effort by various experts to produce this giant catalog of human culture.
14. Is your platform curating and displaying artworks, pieces of music or is it only reviewing them ? Is it what you call the “impossible exhibitions”?
Alessandro: Well you have issues when you want to display artworks because we do not own the right to show them. So we are building partnerships with museum to display art pieces. However, our art section is already very high in the search engine rankings, after Wikipedia there is Hypercritic in the searches about classical art. That’s amazing, it means we are a tool to discover and to enlighten people on classical art, usually reserved to a few. There is a huge potential. I want also to point your attention to the fact that Hypercritic is not only a review. Its a new cultural product based on already existing pieces as it creates new inter-connections. Actually, for us it not really a review, its more of a record.
Giulia: There is a feature that we plan to develop on our website in which each user can own a little space on Hypercritic to create his personal archive.
15. Are the initiatives carried within the organization directed more towards one function or is it coupling many of them ?
Alessandro : At the moment, we are intrinsic but our goal is to create many events to bring people together in real life, not just in the digital space. Once we gather the biggest humanist company in the world, that is a power house, it becomes a trend setter. Imagine what could do 1000 young authors from all background and nationalities.
16. Does the organization see the opportunity to expand ?
Alessandro: I think Hypercritic will show its full power in ten years. Because we realize that we can reach 800 million people, who love to read, to invest money in traveling and who empower themselves through culture.
Giulia : Our first goal is to extend our network. We are always looking for new and young authors from everywhere in the world. You can contact us through the address info@hypercritic.org . We usually ask to write a test article in one specific field in which they are experts. We also train them and teach them how to write according to the SEO rules. So it’s also a training opportunity.
A: Yes you could also become a journalist after writing for us for two consecutive years. Giulia is a professional journalist, so she could knight you into being a journalist.
Hypercritic's website https://www.hypercritic.org/
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