Web muster

Stuart Jeffries gets his bile on in the Guardian over boring blockbuster programming:

Conservative? The Royal Academy's newly open Sargent and the Sea, and the National Gallery of Scotland's forthcoming Impressionist Gardens are set to be both tourist-friendly lollipops and visual Prozac for a staycationing nation of depressed and professionally insecure self-deluders. Not that I won't be going to see Sargent's swelling seas; it's just that I'll hate myself when I do.

Also in the Guardian, an interview with Victoria Miro.

Audience research firm Slover Linett Strategies on the potential hazards of 'gateway' programming.

Jerry Saltz on the Whitney's expansion plans:

If I were on the Whitney’s planning committee I’d trust the curators to curate, even if many of their shows would be infuriating. I’d harp on one thing: building enough interior space to permanently display the permanent collection. The Whitney must learn from the Museum of Modern Art’s mistakes. Even after spending over $750 million dollars on their expansion, MoMA neglected to reserve enough room for the greatest collection of modern art in the world. The result borders on tragic.

And from Newsweek, the Creativity Crisis:

Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist [to measure the ability to generate useful and original ideas]—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

I couldn't resist pasting a few New Zealand artworks into Pixel Width Portraits, although I always wonder if any self-respecting designer would actually use this as a way to come up with a palette.



Finally, New Zealand company My Tours have worked with the creator of the Invisible Paris blog to create mobile tours of Parisian street art and architecture the way natives, not tourists, see them - they look great.