Caroline Corbetta on Lockdown, Digital Shift, and the Future of Art Publishing

In the second episode of the Password video-podcast, actress Margherita Di Rauso reads a text by Caroline Corbetta, who reflects on her lockdown experience and the impact of the health emergency on publishing and curating. Corbetta describes her time as "present," spent reading Moby Dick, listening to bees, discovering an autoimmune diabetes, planting with her daughter, and arguing with her mother. She avoided planning and predictions to fully inhabit the present. She observed nature's relentless vitality advancing from winter to spring, indifferent to the daily death of thousands, calling it "atrocious and wonderful." On the digital shift, she criticizes the hysterical, unnecessary move online by some individuals and institutions who, fearing irrelevance, generated noise instead of meaningful sharing. However, she acknowledges the emergency pushed the Italian art system forward digitally, which was previously backward. She insists digital must now become a tool for new reciprocity. For the future of publishing and curating, she hopes for less market and rankings, more research and expertise. The podcast is part of a series by Marco Enrico Giacomelli, who also promotes Artribune's newsletters: Incanti (art market weekly), Render (urban regeneration biweekly), and PAX (cultural tourism biweekly).