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Wolf Alice has a new EP out, just in time for Friday morning. But first I'm going back to one of my favourite tracks from last year: 'Blush'
 

Graduands

we need to find ways for exhibit designs, themselves, to be as transparent and revelatory as when the web first came along 21 years ago and that moment when you discovered ‘view source’ ...

From Seb Chan's commencement speech to students graduating from a Masters in Exhibition design.

So much good sense

About a million people I follow on Twitter have over the last few days called out the leaked New York Times innovation report and singled out the observations in it that could just as easily (though perhaps not as fluently - the writing in this thing is a joy before you even consider the content: these guys eviscerate themselves with style) come out of museums and other cultural institutions.

If you don't have time or motivation to peruse the whole scanned report linked to above, do at least take ten minutes to digest the work Nieman Lab staffers have done to extract and highlight what they think to be the most interesting points. They describe it as 'one of the key documents of this media age' and anyone who has ever worked near the web in a memory institution will find something here that resonates with them.

Some of extracts I was most drawn to include:

There are about 14.7 million articles in the Times’ archives dating back to 1851. The Times needs to do a better job of resurfacing archival content. The report cites Gawker repackaging a 161-year-old Times story on Solomon Northup timed with the release of 12 Years A Slave. “We can be both a daily newsletter and a library — offering news every day, as well as providing context, relevance and timeless works of journalism.” 

The report proposes restructuring arts and culture stories that remain relevant long after they are initially published into guides for readers. They give an example of a reader wanting to find the Times’ initial review of the play Wicked. “The best opportunities are in areas where The Times has comprehensive coverage, where information doesn’t need to be updated regularly, and where competitors haven’t saturated the market.” They view museums, books, and theater as the best options for that. 

Andrew Phelps (full disclosure: a former Nieman Lab staffer) made a Flipboard magazine of the Times’ best obits from 2013 on a whim. It became the best-read collection ever on Flipboard. Why wasn’t the Times doing stuff like that on its own platforms, the report wondered. 

A quick survey

(NOW UPDATED WITH THE CORRECT LINK - SORRY FOLKS)

I'm currently working on an essay for the CODE | WORDS collection. I'm looking at the connection between people's online and real world relationships with museums and galleries.

As part of this I'm running a short survey. It should only take 5-10 minutes to complete and I would be super grateful for your help.

Please note - the survey is for people who visit museums/galleries regularly and also follow museums/galleries online. If you don't do either of these, I don't want you to waste your time clicking through, so here are some cute things on the internet instead.

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2012 was The Weeknd. 2013 was Chance the Rapper. 2014 might be Boots - mixtape of the year?

Personal fav so far: 'Alright'




You can find and download all 15 songs on Soundcloud.

Neat

I had a chat recently with a friend on Twitter about having an opinion - or feeling the need to come up with a position from which one felt comfortable having an opinion - on big topics like 'war'. Frankly, there are topics that I feel are so much bigger than me that my opinion pales into insignificance and I can relax into topics that instead fall within my domain, purview, and grasp.

Digital humanities fall somewhere between those two points for me. One the one hand, it has solidified into an academic specialisation, something that can - I assume - be separated out now from 'non-digital humanities'. On the other hand, I wonder whether data-driven or programatically-aided research and enquiry justifies being sectioned out like this. (See also data-driven journalism. We have new tools, and they should aid us in what we are seeking to understand and communicate. Maybe the distinctions will fade when the novelty does.)

In the meantime, I keep reading articles like this one to help me wrap my head around the topic. And when I highlighted a phrase that's particularly relevant to an essay I'm prepping at the moment and spotted this pop-up window, I thought, hmmm: maybe technology *is* shaping how we approach and consume ideas.

This prompt to share is there because that is what we do now, to cement our relationship with a text or a visual. And site-makers have concluded that this - rather than cut and paste - is now our chief motivator when we select a piece of text. Or, alternatively, cut and paste remains our chief motivator, and site-makers want to suggest heavily to us that sharing would be a good thing (for us and them). Either way, I find it intriguing. And I wonder again who will be the first of us to stick a 'Pin This' sign under a painting in one of our galleries.

P.S. That article? Digital humanists are angry.

Cross-post

A visit to Peter Peryer's studio, on the work blog.

Right on.

First MoMA collects the @ sign, now they're stocking their design store straight from Kickstarter. I do love a totally consistent piece of wok like this.

On the radio

Today on the radio I'll be talking about David's weak ankles, the cleaning of the Colosseum, and Five Maori Painters at Auckland Art Gallery. And hopefully I'll be able to fit in a promo for this lovely bit of writing by A.S. Byatt on potter Edmund de Waal.

(Update - we only made it through the first two topics.)

Everything is amazing and still I'm not happy

Recently Pippin Barr blogged I feel I have photographed every quaint thing in my neighbourhood of Sliema. As a recent entrant to the world of Instagram, it's a feeling I sympathise with. Few experiences have so sharpened the way I look at the world, and yet paradoxically made it less enjoyable.*

Something about what Pippin wrote chimed in my head with the recent explosion of the term normcore. The phrase has memed to mean "people who dress in a bland, schlumpy, kind of Seinfeldian way". It was first used by trendspotting company K-Hole (who, apparently, are "interested in art but their art context has more to do with the—trending now!—ongoing integration of the thinking creative class into the art world, which has made itself into a hospitable environment and market for experimental thought of all forms, from poetry to PDFs") in a report launched at the Serpentine and MOMA's PS1.

You can download the report from the K-Hole website. It's a bit bullshit, like so many of these things are, but it does capture a feeling in the zeitgeist (remember that word?) that they dub 'Mass Indie'. Youth is no longer an age, but a state of mind. And the state of mind is troubled, because the young are spending all their time proving that they're special snowflakes - so special, that when you put us all together, we look like a snowstorm. A zillion for-all-intents-and-purposes identical flakes milling around; our preoccupation with specialness has become an homogenising force.

Normcore is a defense against Mass Indie.

If the rule is Think Different, being seen as normal is the scariest thing. (It means being returned to your boring suburban roots, being turned back into a pumpkin, exposed as unexceptional.) Which paradoxically makes normalcy ripe for the Mass Indie überelites to adopt as their own, confirming their status by showing how disposable the trappings of uniqueness are. The most different thing to do is to reject being different all together. When the fringes get more and more crowded, Mass Indie turns toward the middle. Having mastered difference, the truly cool attempt to master sameness.

And beyond this yet again, normcore is about belonging. Once, K-Hole argue, we were born into communities and had to find our individuality. Now we're born into individuality and have to find our community. (I know, I know, pampered Western perspective.) "In Normcore," the company writes, "one does not pretend to be above the indignity of belonging."

After that, the report deteriorates. But still I feel like they've captured something. Specialness is being sucked out of the world, perhaps simply because we're so viciously, neuron-jerkingly alert to it. On the internet, everything is amazing - briefly, blurring-togetherly. So what will will be the Instagram of normcore?

*I will continue, however, to fight to the death for your right to see things by taking photos. Especially in art galleries.

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Y'all, Chance the Rapper needs a hug


Meanwhile, I rediscovered Benzel and Jessie Ware's cover of 'If you love me' this morning. I highly recommend putting it on repeat for 20 minutes to lift your mood.
 

Getting It Right

Following on from Hemingway, here's a handy wee site that will correct your capitalisation for essay titles on the fly, based on the rules of the Chicago Style Manual. (Advice that you are free to ignore.)