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, 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.

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, 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, 22 June 2019

The Cleveland Museum of Art releases the findings of its two-year study into whether digital technology deepens engagement at the museum

Barbara Pollock for Artnews: Exhibiting Change: When Some of the Best-Attended Exhibitions in Museums Are Protests, Where Do Institutions Go from Here?

Simple, effective: The Metropolitan Museum Shrouded a Mark Chagall Painting to Draw Attention to World Refugee Day

Laura Raicovich is a kind of writer in residence for Hyperallergic (I guess that's a columnist really though, right?) and her latest is on Rethinking the “Bigger Is Better” Museum Model 

Nothing to do with art museums but I really enjoyed the style & discomfort of Natasha Stagg's Welcome to the doll's house

The Art Institute of Chicago is deaccessioning more than 300 Chinese artworks from its collection via a Christie’s auction in New York in September

Shows by 20th century surrealist artists Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo in NYC

Tess Thackara for the NYTimes on the Minneapolis Institute of Art's exhibition “Hearts of Our People: Native American Women Artists”

Reading list, 1 June 2019

A whole bunch of old stuff as I finally clear and close some ancient tabs ... and some new news

Ed Rodley's report on the 2019 Immersive Design Summit with his take on how it applies to museums, and also the Immersive Design Summit Annual Report (trends and things to watch for)

From April - the report into Australia's national arts / culture / memory institutions, Telling Australia's story - and why it's important: Report on the inquiry into Canberra's national institutions

Jarrett M. Drake's Graveyards of Exclusion:’ Archives, Prisons, and the Bounds of Belonging, a keynote lecture given at the annual Scholar and Feminist Conference.

Adam Moriarty of Auckland Museum posts the notes from his 2018 NDF talk Do Museums Still Need A Collections Online (actually, it's all about getting digital collections out to where people will use them)

Dear lord, just send them home: British Museum considers loan of ‘invisible’ objects back to Ethiopia (The Arts Newspaper)

An article about the Australian Cruthers family & their foundation supporting visual art by women (read it for the foundation's name alone)

Vanessa Friedman in the NYT's collation of Gen X articles on CK One, perfume of an era. That's short, throw in Alex Williams' lengthy overview of the generation if you want more.

Lonnie G. Bunch III, founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, has been appointed secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (first museum director to be appointed in 74 years)

Ada Lovelace Day - three scientists

March 24th is Ada Lovelace Day - "an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science".

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), the daughter of Lord Byron and a prominent figure in English society, has over the past few decades become known colloquially as the 'first computer programmer', by virtue of a group of notes she wrote on Charles Babbage's analytical engine, the last of which included an algorithm for the computation of Bernoulli numbers.

I have to admit, I read a biography of Lovelace earlier this year which brought down my uninformed, but very high, opinion of her. In fact, I found her kind of irritating (I know, I know, I'm an awful person).

So for Ada Lovelace day, I'm going to pull out three women who I've greatly enjoyed learning about this year, and recommend a couple of books if you're interested in finding out more yourself.

Caroline Herschel (1750-1848)

German-born astronomer who worked alongside her brother William in England, first as an assistant and increasingly in her own right. She identified numerous comets and celestial bodies, and worked on several important astronomical catalogues. The Royal Astronomical Society presented her with their Gold Medal in 1828 for her work on a catalogue of nebulae; the next woman to be presented with this award was Vera Rubin in 1996.

Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science is a fantastic book and contains a very good chapter on the Herschels' work; Michael Lemoick's The Georgian Star: How William and Caroline Herschel Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Cosmos expands nicely on this.

Marie Curie (1867-1934)

Polish-born physicist whose painstaking work in France lead to the identification of radium and polonium, the coining of the word 'radioactivity' (and articulation of what that meant), and contributed to the use of radiation in medical therapies.

Curie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize, and the first person to be awarded two Nobels (despite the committee's prevarications).

Barbara Goldsmith's Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie is an interesting and well-written introduction to Curie's life and work.

Lise Meitner (1878-1968)

Austrian-born physicist who worked on radioactivity and nuclear fission, initially at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in Berlin and later - as one of the numerous scientists who were forced to flee Germany with the rise of Nazism - in Sweden.

Despite working closely with Otto Hahn and others on the development of the theory and experimental proof of nuclear fission, she did not share in Hahn's 1944 Nobel Prize for this work.

I'm in search of a good bio on Meitner at the moment - suggestions are welcome.

UPDATE: Since posting this, I've had several recommendations for Ruth Lewin Sime's Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics.

Around the web

Jori Finkel in the New York Times, on dealer galleries underwriting shows of their artists' work in public art galleries. Institutions draw the line in different places: MoCA received 6-figure sums from Blum & Poe, Gagosian Gallery and Emmanuel Perrotin to underwrite its current Takashi Murakami show; the Walker Art Center regularly accepts donations from dealer galleries to underwrite catalogues, but not exhibitions; MoMA and the Met won't take dealer contributions for shows or publications.

Inside Higher Ed asks if university museums are academic units: 'To what degree is a college art museum considered central to an academic mission, and to what extent is it seen primarily as a financial asset?'

Jerry Saltz does some Guerilla Girls-style counting at MoMA: 'Each fall since MoMA’s reopening in November 2004, I’ve gone to these two floors, counted the number of artworks on view, tallied the number of women artists included, and then pitched a fit in print.'

Nothin against MoMA though: equally dismal amounts of art by women artists are on show (or not) at 6 other New York museums.