Reading list, 30 July 2016

A really lovely piece of writing by Tina Barton accompanies a selection of Pip Culbert's work at Artspace.

In which women continue to agonise over their voices.

Google has updated its Arts and Culture website. It has a lot of slick features (Mary Cassatt's work organised by colour, Gothic art organised by chronology) and three galleries (including the AGNSW) are participating in the Art Recognizer, which looks like it uses Google's image search / image recognition to present you with curated web information when you hold your phone up to a (a? all?) work. I'm genuinely curious as to whether this art-discovery tool will reach more people via Google than it would if pushed out through a museum's brand.

I’ve always called the archive her lover. To marry one man, she negotiated owning another man, whom she’s devoted her life to. It’s a weird love triangle, and I’m the other woman.

Alice Gregory for the New Yorker on the archives of architect Luis Barragán, and artist Jill Magid's project around how the archive's owners restricts access (involves diamonds, and descriptions of people such as his taste in women was particular: willowy, dark, with, as Poniatowska put it, “the big, hollow eyes of someone who has suffered.”)

Artists, architects and curators on what does and doesn't make a great museum (from a displaying-art point of view).

Shelley Bernstein on introducing visitor photography at The Barnes (or not).

Reading list, 23 July 2016

Hilton Als profiles Nan Goldin for the New Yorker as 'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency' goes on show at MOMA.

Inside the world's chicest cult - Marisa Meltzer attends the annual Spirit Weavers gathering. While I think it's a bit stink to go to events like this just to shit all over them, this is still an engrossing read.

Art (and more) writer Anthony Byrt interviewed by Naomi Arnold about his piece on poker tournaments and approach to writing in general (podcast)

A hundred years ago the male body was transformed. Two arms became one; legs were replaced by wheels; chins and necks slid together; noses pointed sideways instead of down. As the wounded of Flanders and France started to arrive home, it became clear that many of them could never be restored to physical wholeness. Instead, with the help of the very technology that had blown them apart, they would be reconfigured into new shapes for the coming century.

Kathryn Hughes for the Guardian on the history, social and artistic contexts behind 'The Body Extended: Sculpture and Prosthetics', a new show at the Henry Moore Institute.

Nina Simon on two types of audience-centered museums: customer and user.

I guess we all have to read at least one article about Pokemon Go and museums.

Reading list, 16 July 2016

Terry Dresbach, costume designer for Outlander, on costume design as the 'women's ghetto' of film-making, and the detail that goes into this show.

Shelley Bernstein, recently relocated from the Brooklyn Museum to Philadelphia's Barnes Foundation, on what her job title, Deputy Director of Digital Initiatives and Chief Experience Officer, really means.

E-Tangata keeps on smashing out the best interview features in Aotearoa New Zealand, with broadcaster and comms professional Sefita Hao'uli.

The 'Netflix of museums' - Adrian Hon's VR Will Break Museums.

4,000 objects go on display simultaneously at the New Museum in The Keeper.

On the radio

On National Radio's Nine to Noon today I looked at Jeremy Deller's performance work marking the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, and the effects of Brexit on the British art market.

Reading list, 9 July 2016

I quickly realised that what I didn’t want was a static memorial that the public went to to be sad. ... In the 21st century I felt we had do something different. So I thought about the memorial being human, and travelling round the country. It would take itself to the public rather than the public taking itself to the memorial.

Jeremy Deller's We’re Here Because We’re Here is the most affecting and subtle (yet spectacular in its planning and spread) WWI commemorative happening I have come across.

Renzo Piano's beautiful, empty,  Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre in Athens reviewed by Ollie Wainwright for The Guardian.

An insight into how printers and photographers work together - Ruedi Hofmann, printer for Richrd Avedon, and his battle to have a suite of prints from the In the American West series authenticated.

An insightful, moving, and revealing article about how social work is being merged into library work in urban centres.

Elizabeth Merritt, director of the Center for the Future of Museums, on removing bias from a recent recruitment for an Education Fellow. Many of the tactics she employed are familiar, the reminder to remove lazy shorthand from job descriptions is useful (though salary banding is often informed by statements like 'requires postgrad degree' so that's an extra layer of wrinkles), but the six months taken to run this process - aieeee.

Reading list, 2 July 2016

Everyone loves a good conservation story: bonus points for being about fancy dresses. The Woman Who Makes the Met's Fashion Exhibits Presentable.

From New York Magazine, a profile of Judith Butler, the quietly-legendary queer theorist and person who introduced the idea of gender as performative.

Take a swig from the big old bottle of internet nostalgia: A Mary Anne with Kristy Rising: On the Enduring Legacy of the Baby-Sitters Club Books on Lenny.

Mihingarangi Forbes on Navigating the waters of Māori broadcasting for the forthcoming book Don't Dream It's Over: Reimagining Journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand, previewed on the Pantograph Punch.

There's not much space (or cash) for critical criticism in the New Zealand art scene these days, and so I've really enjoyed Peter Ireland's EyeContact pieces on 'New Zealand Photography Collected' at Te Papa and the photography collection and exhibitions at Christchurch Art Gallery. While I'm unsure that the true test (or measure) of an institution's commitment to artists who work with photography (at least today) is solo or medium-specific solos, I appreciate both the strong authorial point of view and historical perspective of both these pieces.

Sree Sreenivasan was laid off by the Met after three years as their chief digital officer: Jenni Avins outlines how a social media guru manages their own bad news story.