Some things I read this morning

37-year-old curator Dr Nicholas Cullinan has been announced as the new director of London's National Portrait Gallery, the 12th in its 158-year history. Currently a curator at the Met, and co-curator of the Matisse cut-outs show, Cullinan worked as a host at the Portrait Gallery in his early 20s. Cue Drake.

artnet News asked 20 women in the visual arts whether the art world is biased.

I've been lucky enough to work only under women directors but all the institutions they inherited had an annual budget of $15 million or less, which is the glass ceiling of female women directorships. Sexism is a broad problem that cannot be reduced to simply men oppressing women, but is about the set of expectations we have and the goals we set for each other that need serious reevaluation.
—Naomi Beckwith, Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

George Oates, now of Good Form & Spectacle, has worked with Tom Armitage to create the V&A Spelunker, a way of mining through the V&A's vast collections using the fields in the collection catalogue that a 'normal human' could interpret. I'm particularly interested by what George says in her blog post about the Date Graph, where they have matched up 'data created' with 'date acquired'.

Perhaps because I've spent a lot of time with digitised collections, or because I'm not easily swayed by visualisations and maps and graphs, I find it hard to get extremely excited about these projects, but that feature really does trigger insights about how the collection has developed, and gets you asking questions.