Reading list, 18 November 2018

Tara Robertson is back in Wellington as a keynote at this week's National Digital Forum, and catching up with her sent me back to her 2016 essay Digitization: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should, on the social and cultural considerations beyond the value of 'open access' when it comes to digitising archival collections, which is still bloody good.

3 Days, 150 Paintings: A Whirlwind Tintoretto Tour - why won't anyone pay me to write pieces like this? (Lots of reasons, really. Good ones, too.)

For my own future reference - historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore interviewed on her new book, These Truths.

A handy recap: Museums don’t just want gift shops to make money — they want them to shape our understanding of art.

Lisa Martin for The Guardian: Australian cultural institutions struggle to survive as War Memorial gets half-billion dollar upgrade.

Dr. Barabási and his team spent the past three years reconstructing the exhibition histories of nearly 500,000 artists, whose work was shown in about 16,000 galleries and 7,500 museums between 1980 and 2016. He and his team also scoured sales held in 1,239 global auction houses from the same 36-year time period. 

They used this data to help trace the paths that artists took early in their careers, tracking how one who earned a spot on the roster of Gallery A subsequently got exhibited in Museum B and then Museum C, for example.

Kelly Crow's The Surprising Formula for Becoming an Art Star for the WSJ, on a recently published study that over three years researched the exhibition histories of nearly 500,000 artists, whose work was shown in about 16,000 galleries and 7,500 museums between 1980-2016, to map the network of power behind artists who become successful.