Reading list, 28 December 2019

The 11 Biggest Controversies That Rocked the Art World in 2019 and The Art Controversies That Defined the 2010s - from Artnet, so the American view. The increased scrutiny and publicity around the ethics of patronage, sponsorship and governance was my #1 trend for the artworld in 2019.

And The Biggest Cultural Moments of 2019 from Art Agency Partners

50 years of the museum in the community - a write-up from a symposium held at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum and jointly hosted by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (more a list of the talks held than insights generated but still handy)

Open storage is back - profiling the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum's new building project in Rotterdam

"An exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art shows the limits of “soft power” at a time when museums are being transformed by hard activism" - Soft Power at MOMA

Kent Monkman at the Met (NYT)

A group of American historians challenged the NYT's 1619 project: The Atlantic covers the discussion/dispute, and the NYT responds to the criticisms. Interesting for when academic imperatives and perspectives meet journalistic and activist ones.

The five stages of an art world scandal - how the banana made it

Things I missed earlier this year: a two-part interview with Glenn Lowry on the revamped MOMA, succession planning & more (part one, part two)

Reading list, 21 December 2019

In the Guardian - Australia governments urged to stamp out enslavement and exploitation of Aboriginal artists 

Opinion piece in the NYT - How the Superrich Took Over the Museum World 

On Hyperallergic - Organizations Outside the Art World Are Better at Reaching Underserved Populations

On theArtnet podcast - Is the Art World Causing a Climate Catastrophe? (it's the art fairs ...)

Looking back over the Pantograph Punch's year, I re-read an important piece: Will Hansen's Honour Thy Queer Ancestors: On Queer Progress

France Says It Will Return 26 Artifacts to Benin By 2021, in Major Move on Repatriation

Reading list, 15 December 2019

The Art World Really Is Unfair: 9 reasons why, from Artnet

Seema Rao reflects on museum work in the 2010s

The V&A have released their updated exhibition interpretation guidelines (the post has a link to download, plus 10 top recommendations)

The Guardian has launched a public appeal to track down Benin bronzes in smaller museums

Mark Amery and Megan Dunn run down 10 top moments from the past decade of New Zealand art for The Spinoff

Also in The Spinoff, Jim Barr and Mary Barr report on Ruth Buchanan's full-gallery 50th anniversary collection hang for the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. 

Jesse Green for the New York Times: How Today’s Queer Artists Are Revising History

Roberta Smith for the New York Times: A Sea Change in the Art World, Made by Black Creators

Maui Solomon for E-Tangata: Moriori: Still setting the record straight

The State of Museum Digital Practice in 2019: A collection of graduate essays and responses

Reading list, 23 November 2019

The Open Society Foundations, funded by George Soros, has launched a 4 year, US$15M fund to aid restitution of taonga to Africa:

The Open Society’s initiative will support African lawyers, scholars, archivists, and grassroots organizations campaigning for the return of artifacts taken during the colonial era. It will also fund meetings between cultural leaders and work to promote partnerships between museums, governments, and other organizations. 

A report from the Happy Museum with case studies on how six Welsh museums have responded to the Welsh Wellbeing of Future Generations Act

At 88, Agnes Denes Finally Gets the Retrospective She Deserves

Psychology researcher Muireann Irish was one of the speakers I heard at the Big Anxiety conference a few weeks ago: The self in dementia is not lost, and can be reached with care

The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up - a system that looks like chaos to you might simply be complicated.

A number of New Zealand and Pacific voices in this NYT article: Is It Time Gauguin Got Canceled?

On the Dora Maar survey exhibition at Tate Modern: Dora Maar: how Picasso's weeping woman had the last laugh (with the Guardian's reliably bad headline-writing for these kinds of revisionist stories)

A one year review for Max Hollein: At the Entrenched Met Museum, the New Director Shakes Things Up

Counting Ourselves: First comprehensive national NZ survey on transgender health and wellbeing

Disney+ attaches warnings of 'outdated cultural depictions' to classic films

On Dread Scott's slave rebellion reenactment in Louisiana: With a Slave Rebellion Re-enactment, an Artist Revives Forgotten History

A couple of reports from this month's MCN conference in San Diego:

• Because they are hard… Reflections on #MCN2019 by Suse Anderson
• Sustaining and Maintenance: Reflections on MCN2019 by Rachel Ropeik

Reading list, 9 November 2019

Zadie Paul on painter Celia Paul's memoir: The Muse at Her Easel and a response as well from Rachel Cusk in the New York Times: Can a Woman Who Is an Artist Ever Just Be an Artist?

I've just started digging into RNZ's Now We Are Five (Million) on Aotearoa's population growth

Ditto, I need to set some time aside to dig into the NZ Herald's series Land of the Long White Cloud: Pākehā New Zealanders reflect on their colonial past and future.

Amy Qin for the New York Times: ‘Museum Diplomacy’ as New Pompidou Center Opens in Shanghai

Reading list, 2 November 2019

"So why not monetize the intangibles?" Punting the idea of paying admission for popular book stores.

The latest Gray Market: Why Ethical Vetting of Collectors Won't Reshape the Art Market, responding to Brian Boucher's In the Post-Warren Kanders Era, Artists and Dealers Wonder: Should Collectors Be Vetted? for Artnet

Age and readiness are not the same thing: Museum Directors Under 40: A Brief History of 20 Young Leaders Who Helped Shape Their Institutions (American context)

Ngarino Ellis, New Zealand's only Māori art history lecturer, interviewed on RNZ

Teenagers, boomers, and intergenerational critique via merchandise #okboomer

Australian arts activists The Countess have released their latest report on gender representation in the visual arts 

My October Nine to Noon appearance (the Kaldor Public Art Projects exhibition at AGNSW; Renaissance Bologna's unusual support of women artists and The Countess report's data on the not-unusual gender imbalances in Australia's visual arts; the Adam Art Gallery's forthcoming 20th anniversary shows)

Paula Bray on the process of using BookSprints to collaboratively write a book on setting up, running, and shutting down labs in cultural institutions, all in 5 days.

Have been a bit ho-hum on the MOMA opinion pieces, but will always make time for Maura Reilly - MoMA’s Revisionism Is Piecemeal and Problem-Filled: Feminist Art Historian Maura Reilly on the Museum’s Rehang

On the radio, 30 October 2019

Yesterday on RNZ's Nine to Noon programme I talked about:

• the Kaldor Public Art projects exhibition at the AGNSW
• a Renaissance city remarkable for its support of women artists (with a segue to the recently released The Countess report on gender representation in the visual arts in Australia)
• the Adam Art Gallery's upcoming 20th anniversary exhibitions

Reading list, 27 October 2019

Nathan Mudyi Sentance reviews Natalie Harkin's Archival-Poetics for the Sydney Review of Books: "poet Dr Natalie Harkin (Narungga) knows what many First Nations people know, that official archives are a powerful colonial weapon as well as a site of mourning".

Talia Marshall's River monster: My elusive and charismatic father, for North & South

The Whitewashing of “#WhitePeopleDoingYoga” by Chiraag Bhakta: "My artwork was about appropriation. San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum tried to appropriate it".

Improving records for First Nations collections at the National Library of Australia

Nina Siegal rounds up decolonising efforts in Dutch museums: A Dutch Golden Age? That’s Only Half the Story

Shelley Angelie Saggar's The Decolonial Dictionary

Miriama Aoake's Making sense of Tuia 250 through Barry Barclay’s prescient work for The Spinoff

Karin Chernick for Hyperallergic: How Women Artists Flourished in Northern Italy During the Renaissance

Robin Pogrebin and Zachary Small on the complexities of overhauling NYC's racist and sexist public monuments, for the New York Times: New York’s Race to Build Monuments Runs Into Friction on the Ground

Reading list, 19 October 2019

I'm at the Anxiety, Culture, Future conference this weekend, so a shorter round-up than normal.

Speaking of anxiety: it's not a condition I live with, but like everyone I get overwhelmed and stressed on occasion. At Te Papa, this happens a bit more than I've been used to previously (I think I feel a deeper sense of urgency and responsibility here than I have in any previous job). I had a really thorough wig-out a couple of Sundays ago, and this advice about working through a stressful leadership patch would have been a helpful intervention at that time.

A run down on accessibility initiatives in art and other museums on Artsy

The science Nobels were announced recently. In their history, only 20 have gone to women. A common argument is that as more women enter science, over time, the percentage of women awarded Nobels will rise - the same lag effect we use to explain, for example, the representation of women artists in pubic art collections. Liselotte Jauffred, an associate physics professor at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen,and her colleagues used historical data and modeling to find out if the smaller number of women in scientific fields fully accounts for the low number of female Nobel laureates. They called bullshit.

Nesrine Malik reviews the British Museum's Inspired By the East: How the Islamic World Influenced Western Art and Kathryn Hughes reviews the National Gallery's Pre-Raphaelite Sisters (about the women artists, models, makers and managers of the movement) for the Guardian

Lodged last month with the Waitangi Tribunal: WAI292, the Māori Arts Equity and Wellbeing claim

Following on from the large report on women artists, public collections and the secondary art market, Art Agency Partners have released their podcast Why Gender Progress is a Myth

Reading list, 12 October 2019

New Scrutiny of Museum Boards Takes Aim at World of Wealth and Status - yet another report from the New York Times, this time with stats on the 536 trustees of America's 10 most-visited museums, the sources of their wealth

I didn't know that the Victoria & Albert provided career and skill development opportunities for young people as part of its public programme offer. They've just published Let me in: Getting young people into the Creative Industries, a report on the audiences they've serving through these programmes, which they break down into profiles:

• The Selector: Starting to make decisions that will affect their career path 
• The Multifaceted Creative: Talented and interested in more than one field 
• The Decided: Chosen a career, looking for relevant opportunities in that field 
• The Switcher: Transitioning into a creative career 
• The Explorer: Looking for new ideas, spends time critically thinking to form new opinions.

 The New MoMA Is Here. Get Ready for Change, by Jason Farago for the New York Times:

“We as institutions are so trained to treat our temporary exhibition program as the main tent,” said Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA’s director. “And we made the commitment, financially, programmatically and intellectually, that we’re going to shift that. That our main tent is our collection.” 

"Manchester Museum, which is part of Manchester University, is the first UK institution to return sacred artefacts [to Aboriginal people] under an Australian government-funded project to repatriate items of cultural heritage to mark 250 years since Cook’s voyage in 2020."

In funding:

• National Theatre to end Shell membership from next year
• Oligarchs, as U.S. Arts Patrons, Present a Softer Image of Russia
• The RSC was right to ditch BP’s money, but it must keep funding youth schemes

‘This Is a Criticism of the Art World’: Antwaun Sargent Champions Photography’s ‘New Black Vanguard’

Reflecting on Paul Reynolds (1949 - 2010)

A short speech given at the National Library Te Puna Mātauranga on 4 October 2019, when Gareth Seymour was awarded the Paul Reynolds ‘No Numpties’ Award. The award, administered by LIANZA, was set up following Paul’s death in 2010; it has been awarded 5 times, and expires in 2020. The 2019 recipient is Gareth Seymour, of Ngā Taonga.

* * *

Paul's blog, People Points, is still alive on the internet. His quizzical face still looks out at you from the top right hand corner of the Blogger template.

In his final blog post, published on 19 May 2010, Paul updated his readers on a lecture series he'd just delivered around the country for the New Zealand Computer Society. He wrote:

The presentation opened with a speculative challenge as to whether we - that's anyone involved in boot-strapping the next phase of the Internet as an open digital public space - are in touch with the historical parallels of the 18th Century Enlightenment and of how the subsequent gold seams of science and technology came about in part, in addition to the long march to democracy, by embedding public education and literacy as a key public good? 

Turning to current challenges, my thesis is that the current definition/policy frameworks around open data - especially around government-owned or managed data sets - needs to radically expand to include all the cultural/heritage data assets contained in the myriad of cultural institutions - libraries - galleries - archives - museums, which in turn are one of the great products of, and containers for, the inheritance of the 18th century Enlightenment. 

And that, not only were these rich cornucopias of assets and opportunities key ingredients to the development of a 19th and 20th century public literacy, in turn they are key contributors to the development of 21st century digital public space, and its mystic twin - public digital literacy. 

Over the previous 18 days of May on his blog - while travelling to present in Dunedin, Christchurch, Wellington, Hamilton and Auckland, mind you – he had …

• recapped an appearance on Jim Mora's National Radio programme 
• touted the call for papers for the National Digital Forum conference scheduled for November 
• written about Tuhoe's settlement under negotiation with the Crown at that time, 
• shared a video on the concept of Web 3.0 
• referenced Derrida 
• shared a campaign to save Middlesex University Philosophy School (Middlesex was his alma mater) 
• shared a TED talk 
• noted that France had adopted a law change enabling the return of toi moko
• and posted a video of a 2 and a half year-old handling an iPad for the first time. 

I hope that single extract and that quick list - all from fewer than 20 days in 2010 - will give you, if you didn't have the good fortune of knowing Paul, something of an insight into the breadth of his interests, his erudite and capacious mind, his twinkling curiosity, the role he took as a communicator and connector, and his dedication to causes he felt that would uplift and connect people, allow them to learn the lessons of our histories and make a richer future together.

Paul died on 24 May 2010. Today would have been his 70th birthday.

Preparing for this presentation, I read back over the tributes people posted when news of Paul's shockingly sudden death reached us all - fittingly, largely through the internet channels he himself used. He was remembered for his humour, his emphasis on community access and contributions to knowledge, his work with libraries and the wider GLAMs sector, his passion for collaborative action, for being the best kind of friend and colleague: funny, smart, supportive and challenging.

And a word that got used a lot was "visionary". The older I get the more I realise what a rare and special characteristic this is, and how hard it is to maintain over a lifetime. Experience is a wonderful thing but it has a tendency to narrow you down a bit. Paul was always, always expansive, always asking you to think bigger, be bolder.  

That's why I find it so fitting that the No Numpties award was established after Paul's death, donations from National Library, Internet New Zealand, and friends of Paul’s, namely Penny Carnaby, John Truesdale and Sue Sutherland. Sue contacted me in advance of this afternoon - she's very sorry she couldn't make it - and the way she spoke of Paul in her message reminded me what an example that group of friends and colleagues set for me and my group of friends and colleagues: of people excitedly united in a vision of creating benefits for all of Aotearoa by joining the wealth of our collections and taonga, our knowledge and mātauranga, with the communities they all ultimately stem from.

Gareth - congratulations on your award. Very best of luck for your travel to Canada, and your work and connection with First Nations projects there. Paul would have been thrilled to see your nurturing of mātauranga and kaitiakitanga supported through this initiative.

* * *

Giving this speech yesterday caused me a lot of reflection. I felt somewhat hypocritical to start with. Paul (along with that whole coterie - him, Penny, Sue, John, the dreamers and doers of a connected and collaborative GLAM sector) was very influential on my early career, those years when I was working at National Library under their leadership. I'd seen Paul around the Library regularly, and had the odd beer with him in Auckland, and was briefly on the National Digital Forum board with him. But I feel like I didn't know know him, not like (I whisper inside my head) not like the grown-ups did. Not like the people who could talk about Paul as a dear friend, who knew him in the round rather than in the faceted way that I did.

And yet. What it also made me reflect on was a thing I've mulled over a lot in the past 5 or 6 years. The National Library environment at the time I was there (2006 to 2010) felt like a golden age: all the best qualities of libraries (the value of connecting people with information and knowledge that benefits their lives in multitudinous ways; the creation, care, and accessibility of collections that reflect Aotearoa New Zealand) being souped up by the digital revolution; the relaxing and expanding effects of Web 2.0, giving collecting institutions a new role in people's lives; the atmosphere of innovation and experimentation driven by Penny Carnaby, who as National Librarian and Chief Executive brought all her knowledge and love of the library sector to the role, and drove the organisation into the future (with much energy, love, and bullheadedness).

It was also a time of real focus on collaboration: EPIC, the Aotearoa People's Network Kaharoa, Digital New Zealand, the National Digital Forum. Today tt feels like our cultural institutions (my own included) are so busy keeping our own hamster wheels turning, battling resourcing that feels like it's being chipped away (or just is being chipped away) as costs and expectations rise, that we've lost our collaborative muscle tone.

But, reflecting more: it's just time and priorities, isn't it? And leaders and staff who want to work together, are willing to accept the lag that accompanies collaboration because they see the wider benefits it creates. And people like Paul, who challenge us to think bigger than we currently are. If we can't wait for another catalyst to come along, perhaps we just have to shoulder his mantle ourselves.

Reading list, 5 October 2019

Sometimes an exhibition turns out so much better than the core idea suggests it might. Two reviews (the Guardian, the New York Times) suggest Gossamer, an exhibition at Carl Freedman Gallery in Margate, England, curated by Zoe Bedeaux and including artists from Sarah Lucas to Man Ray to Enam Gbewonyo who have worked in some way with woman's stockings, is one of these shows. (Check out the articles for some extraordinary images.)

Charlotte Burns of Art Agency Partners gives Max Hollein, director of the Met, a good poking on repatriating taonga, the stats on women artists & the market & collections & exhibitions,  ethics & governance, and the museum's one billion dollar package of capital projects.

Dropping this here because I'm still working cancel culture out but it's full of useful links: Osita Nwanevu for The New Republic, The “Cancel Culture” Con

And ticketing this one up for value-clashes: Massey University's statement on providing venue hire to a group called Speak Up 4 Women for an event called 'Feminism 2020' that throws the university's commitment to fostering free speech into opposition with its commitment to fostering a campus environment welcoming to all identities.

The latest from the MuseuPunks podcast: Decolonization and its Discontents featuring Sumaya Kassim and Nathan “Mudyi” Sentance.

A request from The Spinoff about gender diversity in exhibition programming circulated around public and private art galleries a couple of months ago - the outcome is Anna Knox's lengthy article Gender bias and art in Aotearoa: a Spinoff survey reveals the harsh reality which ends up focusing on dealer galleries and has some interesting insights / observations (and reveals data is indeed a slippery fish)

Aligned to the proposed re-definition of a museum by ICOM and growing focus on ethical leadership, in the NYT: Shareholder Value Is No Longer Everything, Top C.E.O.s Say:

 Breaking with decades of long-held corporate orthodoxy, the Business Roundtable issued a statement on “the purpose of a corporation,” arguing that companies should no longer advance only the interests of shareholders. Instead, the group said, they must also invest in their employees, protect the environment and deal fairly and ethically with their suppliers.

Kara Walker takes over the Tate's Turbine Hall

By me (cough, cough)

• On RNZ talking about the Amsterdam Museum's decision to no longer use the phrase 'Golden Age', and the theft of Maurizio Cattelan's golden toilet
• A short speech given to remember Paul Reynolds at the event to celebrate Gareth Seymour's award of the scholarship set up in Paul's name.

On the radio - October 2019

In my monthly spot on RNZ's Nine to Noon programme, this week I spoke about the Amsterdam Museum's decision to stop using the term 'Golden Age' to describe the 17th century in Holland; and the theft of Maurizio Cattelan's golden toilet America from Blenheim Palace

Reading list, 28 September 2019

The art of pricing - a new British report on ticketing in cultural organisations

Masha Gessen for the New Yorker: Poland's ruling party puts an extraordinary museum of Polish-Jewish history into limbo

A bit middle-of-the-road, but the attention Nicholas Thomas calls to valuing the relationships that museums foster is important: What are museums really for? (responding to the ICOM definition debate)

I was so surprised by how much I loved the Wallace Collection when I first visited London; reading between the lines here I feel like the new director came in and was like 'So, this no lending thing? Like, do we really think that's what she meant in her will? Really really? Really? But like - do you think we could maybe change it? We could? Yeah? Yeah, good. Good good'. 'Untapped treasure': Wallace Collection to start lending artworks

A Bronx Event Organized by New Museum Shut Down After Protest by Local Activists: a day-long event focused on climate change was shut down by protests from local groups opposing the New Museum acting in the Bronx.

Forest in a Soccer Stadium Outrages Austria’s Far Right - an art project protested for other reasons than you might at first think.

I loved Lonnie G. Bunch III's series of tweets (and series of tweets, Twitter's still a bit shit for aggregating ain't it?) recalling the opening day of the NMAAHC.*

Two deep dives by Erin Potts on current evaluation and measurement techniques for cultural strategy - an annotated reading list, and an analysis of current themes.

*Is that how you usea possessive apostrophe on the name of a person who's a III?

On the radio - September 2019

In my monthly spot on RNZ's Nine to Noon programme, I talked about the debate stirred by the International Council of Museums releasing an update to their decades-old definition of what a museum is, and photographer and video artist Joyce Campbell's full-gallery exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University.

Reading list, 22 September 2019

ON WOMEN

Art Agency, Partners and Artnet News have partnered on a significant piece of research and publishing on women's place in the (American) art world. As the headline article states: Museums Claim They’re Paying More Attention to Female Artists. That’s an Illusion. Depressing and important reading.

In a similar vein - Emily Hartley-Skudder's pretty wrenching piece for The Pantograph Punch, The Power of the Pussy Bow: Fighting Back Against Rape-Art, recounting her experience on a recent residency in China, where another (older, male, European) artist made performance art about his attraction to Chinese women.

Fighting the good fight: Judy Chicago on Rescuing Women From Art History’s Sidelines.

ON PHILANTHROPY

This article makes me realise I'm definitely an incrementalist - and that I need to be mixed in with people who are not, in order to create change ‘We Don’t Need to Demonize Wealthy People’: Ford Foundation President Darren Walker on the Unnerving Aftermath of the Warren Kanders Protests

Philanthropy, but at what price? US museums wake up to public's ethical concerns - with comments from Daniel Weiss, Adam Weinberg et al

Second verse, same as the first How Rich Donors Like Epstein (and Others) Undermine Science (Wired)

FOR FUTURE REFERENCE

Curated resources on diversity, inclusion, accessibility and equity for libraries

On curating difficult ideas A Nazi Design Show Draws Criticism. Its Curator’s Comments Didn’t Help.

A call for cultural courage - a slightly odd direct email from Anne Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum (maybe just odd because emails like this don't get sent out often by directors)

How Lonnie Burch built a museum dream team (a sampler from his new book on opening the NMAAHC)

Reading list, 14 September 2019

Wow, I have a lot of reading to catch up on ...

Daniel Weiss, Adam Weinberg and other museum leaders speak out following the fallout from the resignation of the Whitney’s vice chairman and the ongoing Sackler affair - for The Art Newspaper

There was “next to nothing” about Muslims in the Brooklyn Historical Society’s century-old archives. Now there are 54 oral histories, which serve as the foundation for a new art exhibition.

The Amsterdam Museum will no longer use the descriptor "Golden Age" to for the 17th century:

The Golden Age occupies an important place in Western historiography that is strongly linked to national pride. But positive associations with the term such as prosperity, peace, opulence and innocence do not cover the charge of historical reality in this period. The term ignores the many negative sides of the 17th century such as poverty, war, forced labour and human trafficking.

The Wellcome Collection's new long-term exhibition Being Human has been designed "accessibility first" and has garnered a lot of well deserved press: No art lover left behind: how galleries are finally welcoming disabled people (Guardian); Is This the World’s Most Accessible Museum? (NYT);

A British survey shows that four in ten cultural organisations pay their junior front of house staff less than a living wage.

Lorraine Boissonneault for Slate: The Complicated Decisions That Come With Digitizing Indigenous Languages

Look, I haven't engaged with the Jeffrey Epstein thing at all so just dropping this in here for future reference: Martin Levine, Must Modern Philanthropy Be So Corrosive?, on Epstein's philanthropic relationship with MIT.

The Ford Foundation's president Darren Walker in conversation with artnet's Andrew Goldstein: ‘We Don’t Need to Demonize Wealthy People’: Ford Foundation President Darren Walker on the Unnerving Aftermath of the Warren Kanders Protests

ICOM shrugged off the vote on the proposed new definition of a "museum": Should Art Museums Be More or Less Ideological? After Pushback, a Gathering of Museum Leaders Refuses to Address the Question

Suse Anderson is teaching a new first-year course on museum ethics at George Washington University, and the course outline looks like a primer in contemporary museum discussions

Reading lists, 31 August 2019

ICOM has put up a proposal to rewrite its definition of a museum (used around the world) and national chapters are not down with that (Hyperallergic)

How historic house tours in the south of the United States are being rewritten to incorporate the history of slavery and experiences of the slaves who built, laboured and lived in them (New York Times)

teamLab’s Tokyo Museum Has Become the World’s Most Popular Single-Artist Destination (Artnet News)

From the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe: debating the definitions of art and craft, fuelled by social media (New York Times)

A review of The Warmth of Other Suns, an exhibition at Washington's Phillips Collection mapping a century of displaced and immigrant artists' works (New York Times)

The Ringmaster: Is Charles Venable Democratizing a Great Art Museum in Indianapolis—or Destroying It? (Art News)

Talking Digital Colonialism with Morehshin Allahyari (article and podcast) (Hyperallergic)

A beautiful interactive mapping the geographical distribution of artists featured over the history of the Whitney Biennial (New York Times)

Shifting the Balance: a report from Diversity Arts Australia on diversity in leadership in Australian arts institutions (Diversity Arts Australia)

On the radio - August 2019

This month in my spot on RNZ's Nine to Noon programme, I talked aboutJacqueline Fahey's survey 'Suburbanites' at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery in Wellington; Rembrandt's famous painting 'The Night Watch' undergoing restoration in the Rijksmuseum; and a new study showing a massive leap in value for women artists' work on the auction market.

Reading list, 10 August 2019

Let me suggest an alternate title: new statistics show an area of the secondary market where women artists' work is outperforming mens (it's nuanced)

In follow-up news: Artists Demand Answers [to questions they asked about revisions to the museum's funding policy] One Year After Withdrawing Work From London Design Museum

Andrea K. Scott's summary for the New Yorker: The Whitney Biennial protests and the changing standards of accountability in art

A fascinating write-up in the New York Times, Behind Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: Reframing a Tragedy. Read it for the experiences of Chaédria LaBouvier, the first black woman to curate a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim, which in its 80 year history has never employed a black curator on staff.

The Spinoff making good use of that CNZ money: Megan Dunn and Mark Amery on The art award that’s been annoying the Waikato (and Paul Henry) for 20 years  

Ticketed for reading this weekend: Kyle Chayka's long format interview with Artforum editor David Velasco, appointed in October 2017 when the magazine was in a leadership meltdown.

Jamaica's culture minister challenges the British Museum to return taonga taken when the island was a colony.

New York Magazine identifies New York's most toxic museum boards

Harmony Hammonds is one of those artists I wish I'd known about 20 years ago

Reading list, 6 August 2019

In a democracy, destroying a work of art is never a solution to any offense it may give. Once art has been made and released into the often choppy flow of life, it should stay there. It will live on anyway. To dictate its elimination is an implicitly autocratic move, similar in spirit, if not scale, to the deliberate demolition of ancient art and artifacts by the Taliban and the Islamic State.

Roberta Smith, The Case for Keeping San Francisco’s Disputed George Washington Murals, NYT

Put a little more generously, Mapplethorpe had the canniness and the guts to exhibit pictures that framed his sexual obsessions with a formal elegance that allowed them unprecedented entree into galleries and museums. He aligned perfectly with the historical moment, but that moment has passed.

Arthur Lubow, Has Robert Mapplethorpe’s Moment Passed?, NYT

Hyperallergic podcast: Talking Digital Colonialism with Morehshin Allahyari

Andrew Goldman, ‘Museums Are Contested Sites’: The Art Institute of Chicago’s James Rondeau on Why He Finds the Current Moment So Electrifying, Artnet

Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett, The Tear Gas Biennial, Artforum

On the radio - July 2019

In my monthly spot on RNZ's Nine to Noon programme, I looked at the 150th anniversary of New Zealand painter Frances Hodgkins' birth, and an exhibition and several publications from the Auckland Art Gallery are the culmination of nearly a decade's work by one of our best art historians and communicators, curator Mary Kisler; and the new arts section from The Spinoff

Reading list, 27 July 2019

In sponsorship, boards & ethics

Alex Greenberger for ArtNews: After Months of Protests, Warren B. Kanders Resigns from Whitney Board and ‘It’s Just the Beginning’: Art World Responds to Warren B. Kanders’s Resignation from Whitney Board

Elizabeth A. Harris for the New York Times: The Louvre Took Down the Sackler Name. Here’s Why Other Museums Probably Won’t.

Ben Davis for MOMUS: Where Do We Go From Here? Dubious Wealth and Ethical Funding

The Gray Market: Premature Evacuation: Why the Late Withdrawal of Eight Artists from the Whitney Biennial Ushers in an 'Asterisk Era' for the Art World

Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation on why museum boards must diversify

Bendor Grosvenor for The Art Newspaper on the National Portrait Gallery (London) and their ethical dilemmas around sponsorship & exhibition choices

In new museums

1 museum for every 39,000 people: South Korea's government-dictated museum building boom (partly funded by levies on entry fees)

The French Development Agency, the public funding group that supports the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, will loan €20m towards construction of a new museum on Abomey, Benin, to house returned artefacts

In other stuff

Francis McWhannell reviews Mary Kisler's Frances Hodgkins exhibition for The Spinoff 

Colleen Dilenschneider's latest touches on research showing local audiences have negatively skewed perceptions of the organisations in their area

Elizabeth A. Harris and Robin Pogrebin round up pay disputes happening across American museums for the New York Times

Four major non-profit foundations joined together to buy the archives of Ebony and Jet magazines at auction, to donate to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Getty Research Institute

Reading list, 20 July 2019

Just the most amazing looking show, by an artist I've never heard of: Holland Cotter reviews Mrinalini Mukherjee's survey at the Met Breuer

Very well circulated, ticketed for future reference: Ahdaf Soueif's On Resigning from the British Museum’s Board of Trustees

The Great Wave: what Hokusai’s masterpiece tells us about museums, copyright and online collections today by Douglas McCarthy

David Shariatmadari, 'Shout queer!' The [British] museums bringing LGBT artefacts out of the closet, for The Guardian

A suit against the American immersive arts and entertainment company Meow Wolf alleges discrimination and unfair pay practices, including paying below the minimum wage (the company has 450 employees and is one of the most hotly watched in the immersive experience area)

Bookmarking a mental parallel to 'museums are not neutral' - Alexis C Madrigal on the collapse of the "we're just a platform" defence

In the NYT: What and Whom Are Jewish Museums For? (and who should direct them?)

Colleen Dilenschneider's latest: People Trust Museums… Even If They Don’t Visit Them

Reading list, 13 July 2019

Art historian Douglas Crimp has died, aged 74

Speaking of which - an opinion piece in the NYT by Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang, The Dominance of the White Male Critic

That article tackles critical responses to the Whitney Biennial: see also Xaviera Simmons' Whiteness must undo itself to make way for the truly radical turn in contemporary culture

Ongoing in sponsorship discussions: British Museum director endorses controversial sponsor BP as part of future vision (British institutions are receiving significant pressure on sponsorship from BP; the BM has announced they will continue to take funding and BP will sponsor a 2020 exhibition but it will not be the planned exhibition about the Arctic).

The German Museums Association has released a reworked version of its Guidelines on Dealing with Collections from Colonial Contexts, and called for greater cultural awareness when dealing with colonial restitution.

Reading list, 6 July 2019

SFMOMA announces its first acquisitions made using funds raised by deaccessioning and selling a Rothko

How the Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art has been working to repatriate a Benin bronze head

Mark Amery and Megan Dunn are editing the new art review section of The Spinoff

Lots of words, not many dollar-figures, but still interesting in the Washington Post: Women are increasingly getting the top museum jobs. Will more of them finally get equal pay?

Bookmarked for later reading: Change Agents: Kaywin Feldman and Bryan Stevenson on Embracing Empathy and Confronting American Racism in Museums

Ditto: Laura Raicovich's Rethinking the “Bigger Is Better” Museum Model

And for listening: my colleague Dr Amber Aranui on her mahi as a repatriation researcher and self-care in this role

The joy and weight of responsibility in our working lives - Webstock 2019 talk

About seven years ago, I did a personality test in a HR workshop which gave me one of the most useful self-insights I've ever received.

It was one of those exercises where you're presented with a list of 50 motivations, that you have to whittle down to 20, and then to 10, and then 5, and then to 2.

And at the end of the exercise, the two motivations I had left standing were "responsibility" and "adventure". This pairing told me such a lot about myself. I like to take on responsibility: not just so I can be the boss, but to fulfil my need to take care of things, to make them better. And while taking on responsibility makes me feel secure, I also crave adventure: I need intense experiences, I love the feeling of being on the brink. Being responsible is what makes it safe for me to go into risky places.

This linkage, between responsibility and adventure, is what drives me. And it's what creates the most stress and the most reward in my working life.

When Tash asked me to speak at Webstock I had to ask myself: what value do I have to offer here?

I started by thinking about being in this audience myself, and what I've taken out of ten years of being part of this community.

The defining characteristic of the Webstock kaupapa for me is the shared understanding that as people who create experiences and services for a living, we have the ability to create great benefits for society, but also hold the power to do harm. This morning then I want to explore this familiar idea of responsibility in our working lives, by going deep into what is hopefully a less familiar topic for most of you: the world of museums.

Museums are places of joy, learning and connection. They are also sites of inequity, institutionalised bias, and repression. As a Pākehā New Zealander who has made a career in museums, I spend a lot of time in quite an uncomfortable place - and so I should.

A phrase I often hear is that museums "hold a mirror up to society". This suggests some kind of inherent objectivity, and almost an absence of human intervention, as if somehow the truth automagically appears in front of you when you walk into a museum.

I find museums endlessly fascinating places to work in because they are absolutely the opposite of this. Every choice we make is a choice about value and representation. By driving a museum's intellectual agenda, its funders, management, and staff create the stories and imagery that informs (or confirms, or challenges) how a society thinks about itself.

The way we develop collections places permanent value on selected creative acts and lived experiences. The way we interpret and share these collections out into the world instructs the public on how to think about the past, the present and the future. The voices we give power to are the voices people hear.

Jenny Holzer, Untitled, Times Square, NYC, 1982

As much as we may have liked to believe in the past that we exist above the political fray, museums are the products of colonialist and capitalist systems, as exposed to and implicated in abuses of power as any other institution emerging from these contexts.

This is why museums are not, and can never be, neutral. As a museum worker, as a museum leader, as a person charged to make decisions with public money, with our nation's cultural heritage, and with the attention and trust of our audiences, this is the knowledge I strive to apply every day, with the myriad decisions I make, big and small.

We are also living in a time of elevated public interest in our public institutions. Social media, as we all know, has given voice to groups who have long been silenced. Institutional choices are no longer a private matter, negotiated between management and funders and identified stakeholders. The mainstream media is no longer the dominant conduit of public information.

Museums and their leaders have been swept up in the tide of things that "used to be okay". Like many institutions of power, we got a bit lazy, a bit complacent. And like many institutions of power, we can be bewildered when we're attacked for the habits we've developed over decades, which have rarely been questioned, and certainly not at the volume and frequency they are being questioned today.

Most museums, around the world, have to make money. Depending on whether you're in a context that favours public or private support of arts and culture, your institution may have to raise anything from 5 percent to 95 percent of your annual operating budget. Fundraising is an important facet of any museum director's job, and depending again on your funding model, might even be the most significant measure of your performance.

Commercial sponsorship - effectively, paid-for brand alignment - is one important source of revenue. Private patronage is another, and in American and larger British museums especially, this hinges not just on the director's networks, but those of the Board.

There's an American phrase - "give, get or get off" - that summarises the primacy of revenue generation for what is presented as a governance system. Many American boards expect a minimum annual donation from their members - an expectation, it's worth noting, that greatly impacts the diversity of people you'll see around the board table.

Supporting cultural endeavours has long been seen as a way to "give back to society" - especially when your wealth has been gained, in some way, by exploiting people or the environment. Museums may have had some squishy feelings in the past about the donations they've pursued and received, but for a long time the purity of our missions has insulated us from the taint of dirty money.

Not so much any more.

Last week, for example, Yana Peel, CEO of London's Serpentine Galleries, resigned after the Guardian revealed her connections to a cybersecurity firm whose spyware has been used by governments to track journalists and activists. Peel owns one-third of Novalpina Capital, a private equity firm co-founded by her husband. In March, funds controlled by Novalpina bought a controlling stake in NSO Group, an Israeli company offering technology developed by former intelligence operatives. Although Peel argued she had no influence on Novalpina Capital's investment decisions, her resignation took effect immediately.

Following the announcement, Peel hit out at people leading campaigns like the one that unseated her:

“The world of art is about free expression,” she said. “But it is not about bullying and intimidation"

If campaigns of this type continue, the treasures of the art community — which are so fundamental to our society — risk an erosion of private support. That will be a great loss for everyone.

I'm part of the vanishingly small group who still uses a feedreader. Every day, I check in to see what's happening in the international art world, particularly following the British and American commentary, as the issues that arise there tend to flow through to us here in Aotearoa.

One of the most significant developments in the area of philanthropy over the past 18 months has been the conscious uncoupling between art museums and two foundations, the Sackler Trust and the Dr. Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation. The foundations are built on the wealth of Mortimer Sackler, who with his younger brother led Purdue Pharma while it pioneered and sold OxyContin, one of the drugs at the heart of the American opioid crisis.

The two foundations have ploughed tens of millions of dollars into English and American art institutions. In January last year American photographer, and recovered Oxy addict, Nan Goldin launched PAIN, an activist group with the mission of addressing the opioid crisis by targeting the Sackler family through the institutions that receive their patronage. The group has staged multiple protests, including a die-in where protestors lay prone on the ground, scattered with prescription bottles, in the foyer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has been associated with the Sackler family for over 50 years.

In March this year, the National Portrait Gallery in London announced they were no longer pursuing a million pound grant from the Sackler Trust, which they had been negotiating for over a year for a building redevelopment. Among the pressures on them was Nan Goldin, who publicly announced she would not go forward with a planned retrospective at the Gallery if they took the money.

Days later, the Tate announced they would not take any further Sackler money.

A few more days, and the Guggenheim announced they too were opting out (though it turned out they had not received any Sackler funding since 2015 and were not currently negotiating for any, leading some to see their announcement as virtue signalling).

The announcements came at the same time New York State laid a civil complaint against members of the Sackler family and others involved in the opioid crisis. It accused defendants of seeking to “profiteer from the plague they knew would be unleashed.” And the lawsuit explicitly attacked how the Sacklers had deployed philanthropy:

Ultimately, the Sacklers used their ill-gotten wealth to cover up their misconduct with a philanthropic campaign intending to whitewash their decades-long success in profiting at New Yorkers’ expense.

In May, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced they had ceased taking Sackler funding. "On occasion", the Met's president, Daniel H. Weiss, said in a statement, "we feel it’s necessary to step away from gifts that are not in the public interest."

There are plenty of museum wings built over the past 50 years that carry the Sackler name. There may not be any more inaugurated in the future. The two Sackler foundations I mentioned have announced they are halting all new giving "until we can be confident that it will not be a distraction for institutions that are applying for grants."

In another long-running example, since November 2018 a campaign has been directed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, calling for the removal of board member Warren B. Kanders. Kanders is chief executive of Safariland, a company that amongst other products manufactures tear gas, which campaigners say was used on migrants at the Mexican border and water rights activists at Standing Rock, among other instances.

After arts website Hyperallergic published an article detailing Kanders' position at Safariland and the use of the company's products against migrants and protestors, over 100 members of the Whitney staff wrote to their leadership demanding a response to the allegations in the article, arguing that the museum's silence on the article, and willingness to accept Kanders' position on the Board, made it complicit in these injustices.

Kanders' public statement in response to the letter was unequivocal:

Safariland’s role as a manufacturer is to ensure the products work, as expected, when needed. Safariland’s role is not to determine when and how they are employed. The staff letter implies that I am responsible for the decision to use these products. I am not. That is not an abdication of responsibility, it is an acknowledgement of reality. 

.... I am proud that we have broadened the Whitney’s role as the preeminent institution devoted to the art of the United States. While my company and the museum have distinct missions, both are important contributors to our society. This is why I believe that the politicization of every aspect of public life, including commercial organizations and cultural institutions, is not productive or healthy.

Despite protests from staff, public protests in the museum, and significant media coverage, Kanders remains in place.

These examples illustrate one of balancing acts museum leaders are performing. We're responsible for the financial sustainability of our museums. We are also responsible for their reputational sustainability; these two things are inseparable. And we're responsible for the ethical sustainability of our museums; not just our internal actions and immediate influence, but our much wider and more diffuse connections with the rest of society. Balancing these responsibilities and understanding how to make our decisions - in an atmosphere of growing public scrutiny - is one of the biggest challenges we face.


In his statement, Kanders also wrote:

More than ten years ago, I became involved with the Whitney because I believe its mission is bigger than any one person and that creating a safe space for artists and expression is critical.

When the Whitney director, Adam Weinberg, wrote a response to his staff he elaborated on this idea, calling out to the museum's mission as he asked them to open up a "safe space for conversation". He wrote:

Our community united in common purpose to reimagine a home for artists in the 21st century where they can envision, experiment, struggle, risk and even protest openly, unencumbered and uncensored. We have fashioned this protected space together through mutual trust, respect, openness and discussion even when opinions differ. We respect the right to dissent as long as we can safeguard the art in our care and the people in our midst. As one director colleague describes the contemporary museum, it is “a safe space for unsafe ideas.

This idea of safe spaces is something that I've spent a lot of time thinking about. It is a concept I daresay I've used myself in the past, as a defence against what I felt to be conservative criticism and as a statement of pride in the role of museums in society.

It's a statement I've become far less sure about recently.

Since about 2017 we've seen a series of controversies play out in contemporary art galleries – situations where artists, activists and indigenous groups have protested museums’ activities and decisions. These events have given rise to freshly invigorated discussions about censorship, cultural appropriation, and the power imbalances that pervade museums and society.

In 2017, Dana Schutz’s small-scale figurative painting Open Casket was included in the Whitney Biennial.

The painting is based on posthumous images of Emmett Till, the black American teenager who was brutally lynched in 1955 after a white woman falsely accused him of flirting with her. Till’s mother, Mamie, insisted that his body be presented at his funeral unembalmed and undoctored; photographs from the funeral ran in two African-American publications.

Schutz’s painting had been exhibited in Berlin without comment before being presented at the Whitney. In America, the work triggered a vast array of responses, centred on who has the right to work with which stories and histories, and where the line lies between censorship and perpetuating violence.

Parker Bright, a black artist, conducted a series of protests in front of the painting, standing before it blocking other visitors’ view, wearing a t-shirt that read "Black Death Spectacle", livestreaming his action on Facebook.

British artist Hannah Black posted a widely-circulated open letter online that demanded the work be removed and destroyed. "It is not acceptable for a white person to transmute black suffering into profit and fun," she wrote.

In a statement following the opening of the Biennial, Schutz said:

I don’t know what it is like to be black in America but I do know what it is like to be a mother. Emmett was Mamie Till’s only son. The thought of anything happening to your child is beyond comprehension. Their pain is your pain. My engagement with this image was through empathy with his mother.  

Art can be a space for empathy, a vehicle for connection. I don’t believe that people can ever really know what it is like to be someone else (I will never know the fear that black parents may have) but neither are we all completely unknowable.

The painting remained on display throughout the Biennial, with alterations to the wall label that noted the protest actions.

Also in 2017, Sam Durant’s sculpture Scaffold was due to be installed in a revamp of the famous sculpture garden at the Walker Arts Centre in Minneapolis.

The work, originally displayed in documenta, a contemporary art exhibition held every five years in Germany, was based on gallows used in seven state-sanctioned executions conducted around the world between 1859 and 2006.  This included the largest mass execution in the history of the United States, in 1862, in which 38 Dakota Sioux men were hung in Mankato, Minnesota, an hour’s drive from the museum. Visually replicating the angular lines of the gallows piled on top of each other, the sculpture was designed to be walked over by viewers.

The Dakota community learned of the sculpture only when promotion of its installation began. Dakota people assembled to protest at the construction site, and after a series of facilitated meetings, the museum’s director Olga Viso and the artist agreed that the sculpture and its IP would be handed over to tribal elders to dispose of as they wished.

The museum had failed to conduct any discussions with Dakota representatives prior to this. In an open letter of apology Durant wrote:

I made Scaffold as a learning space for people like me, white people who have not suffered the effects of a white supremacist society and who may not consciously know that it exists. It has been my belief that white artists need to address issues of white supremacy and its institutional manifestations.   

Whites created the concept of race and have used it to maintain dominance for centuries, whites must be involved in its dismantling. However, your protests have shown me that I made a grave miscalculation in how my work can be received by those in a particular community.  In focusing on my position as a white artist making work for that audience I failed to understand what the inclusion of the Dakota 38 in the sculpture could mean for Dakota people.

The Dakota elders made the decision to bury the sculpture. The museum is now working to consult more with indigenous people, and put more of their programming resources into the hands of indigenous artists. Director Olga Viso has left the museum.

I find these examples compelling and concerning because in both cases, the artists were trying to use art to think through and present issues of violence, racism and oppression. These artworks were not casually created or presented, or made by naïve people. They were presented at two of America’s leading contemporary art museums. The art works had both been previously exhibited without controversy. The museums were seemingly unprepared for the response they received. The safe spaces fallacy, I think, had been cracked open.

In 2018, controversy broke out around the American artist Chuck Close, after a number of women alleged he harassed them when they were modelling for him. The National Gallery of Art decided to cancel a scheduled exhibition of his paintings because of the allegations.

After this announcement, two New York Times arts reporters went out and canvassed museum leaders for their opinion on whether Close’s work should be taken off display in art galleries, or shown with a warning.

Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery, was quoted as saying:

How much are we going to do a litmus test on every artist in terms of how they behave? Pablo Picasso was one of the worst offenders of the 20th century in terms of his history with women. Are we going to take his work out of the galleries? At some point you have to ask yourself, is the art going to stand alone as something that needs to be seen?

And Sheena Wagstaff, the Met’s chairman for modern and contemporary art, said:

By taking action in the form of canceling an exhibition or removing art from the walls, a museum is creating an understanding of an artist’s work only through the prism of reprehensible behavior. If we only see abuse when looking at a work of art, then we have created a reductive situation in which art is stripped of its intrinsic worth — and which in turn provokes the fundamental question of what the museum’s role in the world should be.

This is what I think about a lot these days. The fundamental question of what the museum’s role in the world should be. And especially that line: that museums are safe spaces for unsafe ideas.

For several decades now we have acted as if somehow museums are a neutralising force, a separate space into which people can enter and engage differently with these works and these ideas than they would elsewhere. And to some extent that is true, and that is what we have taught our audience to expect: it is true, because we have made it so.

But what these examples all show is that museums are still capable of doing violence – unknowingly, or thoughtlessly, or because we value the presentation of art and art history over the individuals, communities and cultures who may have been harmed in its making, and may continue to be harmed in its public display.

Te Papa's current statement of intent includes the strategic priority "Taking a lead in creating safe places for difficult conversations". As the director of the museum's programme, this priority falls into my remit.

I fully believe that it is Te Papa's role to support New Zealanders in having important and informed conversations. But I have to admit that I have struggled a great deal when I ask myself how we deliver on this goal responsibly and meaningfully.

For example, in the wake of the shootings in the Christchurch mosques on March 15th, I received some pressure to start planning public programming around the topics of white supremacy, hate crime, and institutional racism.

At first blush, these suggestions seemed totally aligned with our ambition - "Taking a lead in creating safe places for difficult conversations".

But what I asked myself was - are we in the position to create that safe space? Te Papa is only just now building links into Muslim community groups. We don't have a high level of existing cultural competency with Muslim histories, protocols or experiences. Our first responsibility, I think, is to becoming a safe partner for the community to work with - if they wish to.

Organising events around a topic like white supremacy also risks turning the museum into a site for these groups to gather and generate attention. It gives them legitimacy by giving them airtime. I question whose safety is protected in this situation - and whose goals are advanced.

I also question whether this is what the community wants or needs right now. Grief needs time and privacy, and those who are close to you, not strangers and extra demands. Coping with a sudden death - especially such traumatic and public events - does not require fulfilling other people's well meaning efforts to help you, or their desire to understand what you are going through.

My response to this situation is deeply coloured by my own personal experience. Seven years ago, I was widowed. My husband, who was a curator in Te Papa's art team, killed himself. It was a reasonably big deal in the little New Zealand art world.

I am not drawing a comparison between his death and the deaths of 51 people in Christchurch. But my experience of a reasonably public loss has forever coloured my feelings around public responses to grief and trauma.

When my husband died, I briefly became a celebrity in a very little world. There was a lot of sympathy, and also some morbid, almost voyeuristic, curiosity. There's a strange glamour that can come along with a tragedy. People want to get close to you, want to share. Some, it seems, are just excited by the emotional intensity, are chasing their own contact high.

At the wake, someone asked me if I still wanted to have kids.

Several men took me aside to warn me not to jump into bed with the next guy who came along.

People asked me how he'd killed himself, how I'd found him, if he'd left a note for me.

And people shared. People shared and shared and shared their stories of suicide: their own attempts, and the deaths of people they loved. People poured their grief into me, and although it was well-meaning, it was overwhelming. There were so many of them doing the sharing, and only one of me to absorb it.

As the years have passed, I can see from my own behaviour how new trauma triggers old trauma, and how sharing is one of the ways we deal with this.

But I can't forget how ghoulish it was to have people wanting to warm their hands on the fire of my loss.

I also remember feeling obligated to reciprocate people's interest. It took me months to learn to say to people ... "thank you for asking, but I don't want to talk about that right now".

So when these questions came to me about museum programming, my instinctive reaction was to say no. Until I could establish that we would be helping, I could only see the potential of being intrusive, demanding, and doing well-intentioned harm.

This, for me, is the problem with the notion of "creating safe spaces for unsafe ideas". "Unsafe ideas", in practice,  usually means "not the majority view". Often, we are asking people from minority communities and experiences to come in and do the labour of educating the majority. And while the majority - and I count myself in here - need this education, I question whether this is the way to fairly and safely achieve it.

So, where does this leave us?

At the start of last year, contemporary art curator Helen Molesworth left Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art under a cloud. The museum's statement said she was stepping down over creative differences; the art world's consensus was that she'd been driven out over her progressive politics, and lack of willingness to pander to conservative museum donors.

In an essay published in ArtForum around the time of the announcement, Molesworth wrote:

The museum, the Western institution I have dedicated my life to, with its familiar humanist offerings of knowledge and patrimony in the name of empathy and education, is one of the greatest holdouts of the colonialist enterprise.  Its fantasies of possession and edification grow more and more wearisome as the years go by. I confess that more days than not I find myself wondering whether the whole damn project of collecting, displaying, and interpreting culture might just be unredeemable.

Given this grim recital, how do we stay positive and keep doing things?

I don't want to end on a glib note, or simply to promote my place of work. But we've done something big recently, that has involved weighing up thousands of decisions on the basis of research, ethics, and community and iwi collaboration.

Te Papa opened Te Taiao | Nature, the redevelopment of our natural history galleries, on the 10th of May this year. It is the biggest project, physically and financially, we have undertaken since opening in 1998. It is also our most indepth interweaving of mātauranga Māori with Western systems of knowledge, and te reo Māori with English interpretation.

Every decision that went into the making of Te Taiao is based on the impact we are hoping to have. As you move around the exhibition, we hope to lead you on a journey through which you become more knowledgeable about our unique environment, more aware of the threats to it, and more motivated to make changes in your life to help protect it.

We dazzle you with specimens, we stun you with science, we engage you with shadow play and interactives, and we move you with the silenced voices of extinct species. If we really do our jobs though, you go home and make a change; in your own life, in your community, in the way you get involved in political decision-making.

Using our audience impact model - developed in house by one of my colleagues - we're seeking to track and understand our success against these objectives. This isn't a short-term thing: the exhibition will likely be around for 20 years, and we're hoping to affect generation after generation with it. With 1.5 million people through the building every year, in addition to our education, social and online reach, the museum has a significant opportunity to lead social change by shaping how people see their environment and their responsibility to it. It is a privileged position, to hold the resources to do this mahi, to build the knowledge and the relationships to do it responsibly, and to experience the joy of creating things that people will use.

And that's the crux of it, isn't it, really?

The ability to affect social change, to change people's minds and lives, to correct past wrongs and not create new ones.

The responsibility of holding power.

The joy and the weight of our working lives.

Sources of thought and direct quotes

Sponsorship and Board conflicts

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/may/02/turner-prize-drops-stagecoach-as-sponsor-over-anti-gay-views

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/arts/design/serpentine-galleries-ceo-resigns.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/arts/design/design-museum-london-shepard-fairey.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/opinion/sunday/met-sackler.html

http://www.thegray-market.com/blog/2019/3/31/halt-and-catch-fire-why-a-pause-in-new-giving-by-two-sackler-family-bodies-could-mean-even-more-change-is-in-store-for-arts-philanthropy

http://www.artnews.com/2019/02/10/nan-goldin-sackler-protest-met-museum-guggenheim/

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/sackler-trust-national-portrait-gallery-1492120

https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/oag_opioid_lawsuit.pdf

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/londons-leading-museums-face-growing-pressure-accepting-money-linked-opioid-crisis-1249490

http://www.artnews.com/2019/03/22/whitney-museum-warren-kanders-controversy-timeline/

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4295-kanders-must-go-an-open-letter-from-theorists-critics-and-scholars-updated-list-of-signatories

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/18/arts/whitney-protests.html

http://www.artnews.com/2018/12/03/truly-live-difficult-times-whitney-museum-director-responds-demands-action-vice-board-chair/

Safe spaces

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/dana-schutz-controversy-recent-protests-changed-museums-forever-1236020

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/21/arts/design/painting-of-emmett-till-at-whitney-biennial-draws-protests.html

https://walkerart.org/magazine/a-statement-from-sam-durant-05-29-17

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/28/arts/design/chuck-close-exhibit-harassment-accusations.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/26/arts/design/national-gallery-of-art-cancels-chuck-close-thomas-roma-sexual-misconduct.html

https://walkerart.org/magazine/soundboard-museum-resolutions-anthony-romero

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/moca-helen-molesworth-tension-1246358

https://www.artforum.com/print/201803/helen-molesworth-on-the-work-of-simone-leigh-74304