Reading list, 24 December 2016

Amelia Groom muses on Ōtsuka Museum in Japan, where masterpieces of Western art have been digitised, printed on ceramic tile and put on display, creating a massive museum of simulacra disassociated from time.

Randy Kennedy profiles New York dealer gallerist Marian Goodman for The New York Times.

Tauhere, the journal organised by emerging museum professionals in Aotearoa New Zealand, publishes its second issue (PDF) in time for the Christmas break.

Sean Mallon, inspired by Albert Wendt: Why we should beware of the word 'traditional'.

The very attractive NYT recommended reading 2016 list. 

Reading list, 17 December 2016

Kyle Chayka for The Verge on how the formatting inherent in Google's AMP and Facebook's Instant Articles makes it hard to discriminate between news sources.

NPR's Best Books of 2016 - a more diverse and less intimidating listing than most.

#ShowMeTheMonet - the New York Times  profiles the hunt for the Marcos art collection.

MBIE have released the report on copyright and the creative sector in New Zealand.

Anthony Byrt on the new Noted site on what Auckland could learn from Detroit.

The inimitable Glenda Jackson.

Reading list, 10 December 2016

Jennifer Schuessler in The New York Times on an independent report commissioned by Yale University into the 'renaming controversy'.

Max Chafkin for Bloomberg Businessweek: Confessions of an Instagram Influencer - dissecting how to get to the point where you'll be paid to Instagram.

fari nzinga on public trust and art museums, from her MCN talk and published on The Incluseum.

Anthony Byrt on Kate Newby for Paperboy - a recent Mediawatch segment suggested Paperboy may expand to Wellington, in response to which I say "Yes, please".

It seemed like months, years, followed the evening in the hipster pub, where we would find ourselves shifting from table to table, raising our glasses. Sampling the regional spirits of the Western world. About three years on from that early pub date we found ourselves with a fat, spirited baby, going through the ropes of getting him two passports. If the umlaut had been fascinating to me before, it now became something of a furious obsession.

From Airini Beautrais' Landfall Essay Competition winning piece, Umlaut, published on The Pantograph Press.

Shelley Bernstein on an experiment using Amazon's Alexa to answer visitors' questions in the gallery.

Johanna Hanink reviews Tiffany Jenkins' Keeping Their Marbles (a source of much angst earlier in the year) for the Bryn Mawr Classical Review.

This week on the radio

Today on Nine to Noon, at about 11.45am, I'll be doing a whirlwind tour around the country covering exhibitions for people to see over the Christmas break, including:

Anne McCahon, Te Uru, Auckland

Ann Shelton, Auckland Art Gallery

Richard Orjis, Tauranga

Frances Stachl, Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui

Buy Enjoy fundraiser, Wellington

James Greig, The Dowse, Lower Hutt

The Devil's Blindspot, Christchurch Art Gallery

Lisa Walker, Christchurch Art Gallery

Kushana Bush, Dunedin Public Art Gallery

Reading list, 3 December 2016

My Sunday routine is pretty unshakeable, and E-Tangata's weekly profiles are a significant part of it. This week: te reo advocate and member of Te Mātāwai, Mereana Selby.

Olivia Laing wrote The Lonely City, one of my favourite books this year. Here she is on Robert Rauschenberg's life and work: she's the subject of a new show at Tate Modern - Hal Foster wrote for the catalogue, a piece reproduced on the LRB site.

Writer and anthology editor Jolisa Gracewood wrote up influential and much-loved books from throughout her reading life for the New Zealand Festival website: we have significant reading overlap, but Jolisa can nail down the essential nature of a book where I would flail and hand-flap.

"My only conclusion is that LinkedIn is the social media equivalent of cargo shorts" - Jonathan Kelso on LinkedIn for Tusk's Digital Platforms series.

Mark Wilding for The Guardian on the diversification of British podcasts, and Imriel Morgan, co-founder of one of the discussed podcast networks, on Gal-Dem about developing audiences and advertisers.

Claire Murdoch for Te Papa's Off the wall on the gender politics of Alexis Hunter's photographs.

Ashleigh Young for The Spinoff on the correct spelling of the word eh.

Reading list, 26 November 2016

Jonah Weiner for Billboard on Donald Glover and Atlanta, probably my favourite piece of pop culture this year.

Victoria Wynne-Jones interviews Erica van Zon for The Pantograph Punch, the first in a series of artist features The Dowse is collaborating on with PP.

This week it was my great pleasure to do a 'fireside chat' with ACMI's Chief Experience Officer Seb Chan for the National Digital Forum conference in Wellington. Here's a recent interview with Seb from Sandpit, 'Everything is partially broken'.

Every word Maciej Ceglowski publishes is worth reading: his latest talk is Who Will Command The Robot Armies. As always, it is hilarious, thought provoking and terrifying in equal measures.

Mark Sinclair on the Kinfolk redesign, and a throwback to Rob Alderson's piece last year on the divisiveness of the magazine and its aesthetic.

The ongoing fascination of digital restoration and facsimiles: Daniel Zalewski for The New Yorker on Factum Arte, a “digital mediation” workshop which seeks to “redefine the relationship between the original and the copy.”

Reading list, 19 November 2016

Rob Walker for the New York Times Magazine's Design Issue: Inside the 21st century craze for redesigning everything.

James Surowiecki for The New Yorker: What's in a brand name (when Marianne Moore suggested Utopian Turtletop for a new car but Ford went with Edsel)

Lynda Kelly on audience research for exhibition topics (some points reassuring, some points dismaying)

Nina Finigan frames up Tusk's newest theme: digital frontiers (and museums). See also Jane Groufsky on curating and online anecdotes; Bridget Reweti on her Flightpath podcast.

Elizabeth Merritt of the Center for the Future of Museums on data about the political affiliations of various American museum roles, and areas of conservatism in our field.

Sally Blundell for the NZ Listener on Te Papa's plan for extended art exhibition spaces, released this week.

A congressional panel in the States finds that the country needs an American Museum of Women’s History (to be run by the Smithsonian but the construction to be entirely funded by donations).

Reading List, 12 November 2016

Sometimes a writer just goes to town on a (literally) tiny little subject, and it's a delight to read. To wit: Ian Brown for The Globe and Mail on the Art Gallery of Ontario's exhibition of miniature carved boxwood prayer beads.

Sarah Archer for Hyperallergic on the Philadelphia Museum of Art's exhibition of fashion made with Vlisco fabrics: How Dutch Wax Fabrics Became a Mainstay of African Fashion.

Jiayang Fan for The New Yorker on the private/public museums of Chinese billionaire art collector Liu Yiqian.

One of the funny things about taking over a public art gallery is that it somehow feels like you can't say 'Hey, actually, it's great as it is, I really look forward to contributing my own skills and point of view'. Instead, everyone expects you to change things. For example, this interview with the incoming director of the Dallas Museum of Art, who follows on from Max Anderson, who made massive overhauls in how the museum treats its visitors: New DMA director thinks Dallas’ flagship museum is art-rich but needs to change the way it relates to visitors. Having said that, I thoroughly endorse Agustín Arteaga's plan to introduce multi-language interpretation.

On the radio

On the radio today I'll be talking about the dropping of the art history A-level, MOMA's acquisition of the original 176 emoji, and Koen Vanmechelen's Cosmopolitan Chicken Project.

Griselda Pollock, 'Axing A-level art history only amplifies class divides', The Conversation

Paul Galloway, 'The Original Emoji Set Has Been Added to The Museum of Modern Art’s Collection', Medium

Hilarie M. Sheets, 'Playing Chicken With the Art World', New York Times

Reading list, 5 November 2016

It starts off sounding like a typical "an elephant painted this" story, but Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen's Cosmopolitan Chicken Project is way more interesting than that.

American painters Kerry James Marshall is interviewed by the Art Newspaper on the process of assembling his touring retrospective, and is very straightforward about the way institutions' own rules get in the way of their own projects.

Lana Lopesi reviews Johnson Witehira’s Half-blood for the Pantograph Punch, who are strengthening their visual arts coverage.

Megan Marshall previews her forthcoming book on the relationship between poet Elizabeth Bishop and Alice Methfessel in a long, affecting article for The New Yorker.

All critique and no solution: a British theatre critic (paid to write for the Guardian) queries the emerging American model of arts criticism in newspapers subsidised by philanthropy.

Sounds like sour grapes: Why Do Colleges [actually - college art museums & their exhibitions programmes] Have So Much Art?

Reading list, 29 October 2016

Shelley Bernstein teases a new wearable-tech approach to interpretation at the Barnes.

“When you go to a store, they are public buildings as much as they are privately owned businesses. You walk into Topshop, you walk into Loewe, you walk into J.W., you walk into a department store — they are these open buildings, which I feel have to give back. Now, they can give you back an experience, customer service, or something you’ve never seen before so it’s educating you at the same time."
“I enjoy going into a store where I find something new, so when I go to Dover Street [Market], I go 'Wow, that fuelled me up for today.' Now I will come back and make a repeat purchase, it’s not a hard sell. We need to lure people in to make them feel part of what we’re doing.”

I continue to be interested by how Jonathan Anderson's view of designing for two fashion houses links with running museums.

The time is certainly ripe for the "rediscovery" of Carolee Schneemann.

Walsall is a town in England's West Midlands, with a central population of about 68,000 and a wider borough of about 270,000. Faced with having to find  £86m in savings by 2020, the local council is floating proposals to shutter 15 of its 16 libraries and slashing funding to the 15 year-old New Gallery, opened during the regional museum-building boom of the turn of the century. This article, interviewing local library users, shows the kind impact on quality of life these closures threaten. Working for a council myself, I fully understand how imperative - and difficult - finding savings can be, and I have such sympathy for this situation.

Can a polemical, even propagandist, cartoonist be absorbed into the framework of outsider art? Jeet Heer on the death of Jack Chick, the 'Leni Riefenstahl of American Cartooning'.

Reading list, 22 October 2016

Carolina Miranda for the Los Angeles Times on artist protests over gallery-driven gentrification in the city (a much more nuanced article than I expected from the headline). On Hyperallergic, a pendant piece by Seph Rodney on galleries moving into Harlem.

John Morrison for The Conversation, proposing an alternate narrative of the development of Scottish art, driven by Scottish identity, for the country's galleries.

Lana Lopsei and Francis McWhannell review Artspace's New Perspectives for The Pantograph Punch. The discussion format reminds me of the issue of the Circuit podcast where Thomasin Sleigh, Mark Amery and Tim Corballis discussed Stephen Cleland's Inhabiting Space at the Adam Art Gallery.

Researcher and activist Chris Garrard critiques London's Science Museum over entry charges and sponsorship by an oil company for their new children's lab.

Elizabeth Merritt of the American Alliance of Museums on volunteers and museum labour.

Kaywin Feldman of Mia on gender and leadership in American museums:

We recently completed a branding process at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, working with the design firm Pentagram. We had been in the fun and engaging process of fully defining and expressing our brand for the previous 4 years. Pentagram studied us and responded, “Your full name is too long. Luckily, your acronym is pronounceable. You’re just saying your name wrong. Instead of being MIA – Missing in Action or the Miami International Airport – you should be “Mia”, which means “mine”, “my own”, or “beloved” in 8 languages. Now that was pretty compelling, but our team was concerned. At first nobody articulated it, but the discomfort derived from Mia being a female name. Finally, one of our trustees voiced it: he didn’t like Mia because “it is not strong. It’s not classical or smart. It’s just not serious.” I pointed out that if our name spelled “SAM” or “STEW” he wouldn’t have had the same reaction. What he was clearly saying, was that the name – a female name – didn’t have “gravitas”.