Web muster

A varied bunch today:

1.

Every morning I open up my feedreader and look for Pippin Barr's latest drawing



The feed I get doesn't include Barr's note on the drawing, so I always end up clicking through - as you should ....

2.

Many of these links are brought to you from my Instapaper file. I love this bookmarking app - it's one of the few tools I've bothered to implement both at home and at work. I also follow Instapaper creator Marco Arment's blog, and found this post about letting things go, in order to make the remaining things better, to be great reading. I'd like to train myself to ask "what could we get rid of" before I ask "what could we add" when I'm talking about improvements to things.

3.

A little bit of library porn. I'm leaving the sector soon, but my love of libraries and belief that they're essential community services continues to grow.



4.

I don't know if I'm disappointed or relieved that the trend of desserts that look like collection items hasn't reached New Zealand's shores. This post by a pastry chef at SFMOMA still leaves me undecided.



5.

One of the nicest leaving-my-job blog posts I've read, by Lesley Williamson, on departing from the Mattress Factory:

The Mattress Factory operates with just 12 full-time employees – a talented, creative, multi-tasking, collaborative group of people. Many are artists themselves. The organizational structure is extremely horizontal. Of course everyone knows that the buck stops with Barbara and Michael, but otherwise there is no hierarchy. Bureaucracy is almost nonexistent.

6.

Sadly, I don't have time right now to listen to this hour-long interview with Jeffrey Deitch, but maybe one of you does.

Turn to the left

Fashion exhibitions bore me to tears. I think it's the mannequins. They look as bored as I feel.

Having said that, now I'm going to blog about a fashion show. Well - two fashion shows, and the (much more interesting to me) online activity around one of them.

In January 2009 the Metropolitan Museum of Art took over the custodianship of the Brooklyn Museum's fashion collection, as the BM was no longer able to afford to maintain it. Two concurrent shows have been organised using the combined collection: 'American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity' at the Met, and 'American High Style' at the Brooklyn Museum. (Check out the Roberta Smith and C-Monster reviews).

Installation view of 'American High Style' by Carolina Miranda, on c-monster.net

So far, so-so. Bored looking mannequins. And then I saw Shelley Bernstein's post, where she described how Brooklyn Museum has partnered with Polyvore (a fashion-lovers website, where members get tools they can use to collage together fashion items and other visual material then save & share the results), uploading images of collection items so they can be remixed with contemporary fashion items.

My friend Nat nailed it in an O'Reilly Radar post: "the greatest challenge to heritage institutions is irrelevance, not penury. Brooklyn Museum is unsurpassed in creating relevance for its collections and its existence, and they do it by reaching out, where people are and not expecting them to come directly to us." As they so often do, the Museum has successfully taken itself out to the community, rather than waited and hoped the community might come to them.

The interactive on the Brooklyn Museum website

The remix tool is available in three places; on a kiosk in the exhibition, on the Brooklyn Museum website, and on Polyvore itself.

Vintage, by pinkopaque22 on Polyvore

As Shelley Bernstein notes:

I often speak about going to community and engaging on their terms and this is a good example of that—we need to be reaching out, where people are and not expecting them to come directly to us. As a museum with a small tech staff, we need to be mindful of any opportunities that come our way that can save us time and coding and Polyvore fits that bill too. ... It’s rare to have an opportunity like this one that so beautifully melds all of these objectives, but keeping our eyes open to these possibilities has provided something exciting for our visitors.

I think this is a beautiful project. The only extension I can think of would be to get the writers from Go Fug Yourself to review the exhibitions (in much the way they reviewed the Met's recent Costume Institute ball).

Take me there

Humans make patterns out of information, even when patterns don't really exist. Hence lucky undies, and this post.

Over the past few weeks I've seen posts and articles about 'curation' popping up all over the place.

First up, Aaron Straup Cope at this year's Museums and the Web presented a paper titled 'Buckets and Vessels', looking at curatorial practices ranging from Flickr Galleries to Newspaper Club. (See the slides from Cope's presentation) He argued:

People are not suddenly self-identifying as curators. Rather, what we are seeing is a growth of tools being made available to allow people to exercise a curatorial muscle many people never knew existed, even if the results don’t always look like something we’re used to.

Cope cited Pete of New Curator's March 2010 article 'You are not a curator'. Pete argues for the difference between filtering (sifting and aggregating data) and curating, which in the comments he says begins with "providing meaning".

The difference between aggregating (picking) and curating (adding meaning) is a sub-current of Robert Scoble's lengthy post 'The seven needs of real-time curators'. Scoble sees a market gap to build tools that will let people aggregate, weight, and visually represent data from all over the web in a way that's meaningful to them and to others.

Then a post a few weeks ago on the Nieman Lab site caught my eye: Calmness, curation, cat porn: Dave Eggers’ joys of print:

“I want a printed newspaper curated and edited by professionals that have been in the trade for decades,” Eggers said. “I am in eternal deference to expertise.” Eggers likes the idea of branded — which is to say, vetted — news outlets shaping his view of the world. “I entrust my daily news input to the professionals,” he said.

Finally - another MW2010 paper, this one by Nate Solas on 'Hiding Our Collections in Plain Site: Interface Strategies for "Findability"' about a website re-design intended to help with the problems faced with surfacing large amounts of digitised collection items.

What's the pattern that I see here? You could say "ways to defeat information overload", but I refute that term. Close your eyes. Switch off the tv. Shut down the browser. Or - find people and tools that reliably take you to things that are valuable, entertaining, expanding.

Score!

So, turns out Friday is book day round here right now.

I saw a bunch of news stories today about Puffin's 70 best-ever children's book list. I couldn't figure out why none of them linked to said list - then I realised you had to go to the Puffin site, navigate to their anniversary sub-site, go to Downloads, and then open a (slow-loading in NZ, just a warning) Flash file to read what is actually an entire, and rather wonderful, book that covers babies to teenagers. So, my Friday gift to you ... The Puffin Handbook (open with care, and whatever you do, don't click the circle beside the left-hand arrow, it takes you back to the homepage).



One of the nice things about the book is the way it mixes classics and recent publications, and the small recommendation lists. [YAY! The Guardian has published the list as a list]

I read a lot of YA, but I tend to read classics, or stuff that falls into the fantasy sci/fi category. I think I do this because YA set in this everyday world is often shallow, or modeled on the same dreary stuff that adult fiction is - so what's the point?

But I'm trying to self-medicate, and I'm starting with Mal Peet's Exposure. You might argue it's fantasy, but I don't care.

Exposure is the third in Peet's series of books about football (that's soccer to us NZers), set in a imagined South American country with one continuous character, leading sports journalist Paul Faustino.

This third book is a retelling of Shakespeare's Othello. Othello is a superstar soccer player, bought in from the North for fifty million dollars to play for Rialto. 'Born in the North, and famously proud of his African heritage', Otello comes to Rialto at the cost of the transfer of one of their white players, doesn't endear him to his team mates. All hell to break loose when Otello and americana (white) pop-star Desmeralda fall in love and marry - especially with Desmeralda's rich, powerful father, who is also a part-owner of Rialto, who objects to the colour of his new son-in-law's skin. Throw in Iago in the form of Otello's janus-faced manager Diego, and boom - you're off.

The story of Dezi and Otello - of paparazzi, charity auctions, and controversial product endorsements - is intercut with that of three street kids, living under the threat of the 'Rat-catchers' (government employees clearing the streets prior to an election campaign) and vague rumours of deaths and disappearances. There's something about the narrative structure that reminds me of the tv series The Wire - slices of society that rub up against each other almost unknowingly, but whose actions have flow-on effects, sometimes immense. And awash, of course, with corruption and emotion.

My favourite review of the book was a no-stars write-up on Google Buzz, with the reader complaining that "The story is improbable". Well - duh. Shakespeare is. People fall head over in heels in love after two sentences and a bit of merry gender confusion. With Exposure, you just need to accept it - of course two young hot kids from different side of the social divide are going to fall drastically in love - and then roll with it.

Exposure is a rollicking good tale. But the quality of the writing sets it apart. I'm half-way into the book and I know we're about to enter the 'murder mystery' storyline, and the slightly hard-boiled tone of the writing is perfect. One of my favourite passages so far:

Walking back to his car, Diego smiles. It's like walking on eggshells, talking to Otello about drinking. Diego likes the way they crunch beneath his feet.

So, sport. And life, death, love, and betrayal. If you want an equally gripping non-fiction take on all this, I highly recommend H.G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream, about high-school football in Odessa, Texas, and the origin of the terrific (and scandalously badly-programmed) tv series of the same name.

Buy now, pay later

The lawsuit Miami collector Craig Robins has brought against New York art dealer David Zwirner over access (or lack thereof) to works by Marlene Dumas has caused a mini blizzard of coverage in American publications (see the Art Newspaper, the New York Times.)

From the NYT:

Mr. Robins asserts that he sold a painting of a dark figure by the highly praised South African-born artist Marlene Dumas through the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea in 2004 with an agreement that the sale remain confidential. But the gallery, which did not yet represent Ms. Dumas, told her about it, Mr. Robins claims, causing her to become angry with him because, like many artists, she prefers to see her paintings remain long term in prominent collections.

Mr. Robins says that Ms. Dumas — one of whose paintings sold for more than $6 million at Sotheby’s in 2008 — maintains an active blacklist of those she views as speculating in her work, a blacklist that, he says, he is now on (and whose existence his lawyers, who were back in court on the case this week, say they plan to prove).

Edward Winkleman suggests that one way of introducing more transparency to the art market would be to bring in droit de suite, or artist resale rights, a scheme under which artists and (and then their estates) continue to receive a percentage of every resale of one of their works up to a certain number of years after their death.

On June 9 Australia goes live with its own resale rights scehem. According to the Sydney Morning Herald not everyone is happy with the scheme or how it's been implemented:

Even supporters of the resale royalty are critical of its implementation. Gallery owner Michael Reid said the scheme would be a costly administrative burden for commercial galleries and dealers.

"Why should I be expected to undertake this time and paper burden for nothing? The absence of any details as to how the scheme will work screams volumes as to arts policy incompetency," Mr Reid said.

Artist resale rights were debated here in New Zealand under the previous Labour government, but the issue seems to have gone cold. The National government's focus has shifted instead to philanthropy, with the recent release of the Cultural Organisations: Giving and Sponsorship Research Report and the creation of the Ministerial Cultural Philanthropy Taskforce (Peter Biggs, Margaret Belich, Carolyn Henwood, James S Hill, Dame Jenny Gibbs, Dayle Mace), which is looking at possible incentives to encourage private individuals to give more dosh to the arts.

Fame!

Last week I wrote about visiting the Anthony McCall show at the Adam.

While I was there, two art students (well - that was what I thought, anyway) were rather self-consciously playing with the light-streams. It reminded me of this post on the Walker Art Centre's site, announcing a forthcoming event focused on David Lamelas' 1967 work Limit of a Projection 1.


On one of the museum's Target Free Thursday Nights, visitors were invited to have their photos taken under the spotlight. The images were then posted to a Flickr set.



It makes me wonder how many 'guerilla' portraits are already out there ....

Off topic

I don't usually post about what I'm reading, but over the past 6 months I've fallen back in love with YA fiction, and like anyone who's full to the gills with dopamine, I feel the need to talk about my loved one.*

Sometimes you open a book and the voice grabs you on the first page and doesn't let you go until the last. These three are like that:

Patrick Ness The Knife of Never Letting Go (the first book in the Chaos Walking trilogy)

A good fantasy (I've reclaimed that word too) writer creates a world that is totally believable. Todd Hewitt's world is a settler colony, where humans have beaten the indigenous population into submission, but somewhere in the war suffered a terrible loss. As a result, there are only men in Todd's world - men whose Noise, their every thought, is broadcast for all to hear.

Rebecca Stead When You Reach Me

A slim, perfect book about love, death, friendship, being 12, and time travel - and a love letter to Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Wrinkle in Time' to boot.

I ordered Stead's book through the public library after finding out it was the winner of last year's Newbery Medal. When I picked it up and saw the big print, I felt disappointed; I'd been excited, but thought that even with my growing passion for children's and YA novels, this was going to be too simple. It wasn't. Stead gradually reels out and satisfyingly ties up (but not too tightly) a complex story with a minimum of verbiage.

Margo Lanagan Tender Morsels

If The Knife of Never Letting Go is dark at times, Tender Morsels is midnight. An often unsettling re-telling of the Grimm story of Rose-Red and Snow-White, this is some of the best writing I've read in years.

When Neil Gaiman spoke at Wellington Town Hall earlier this year, the thing I was most struck by were his comments on CS Lewis.

Like me (and many, many fortunate people) Gaiman didn't get the Christian references in the Narnia series until quite late in the series (me, I had to wait until my born-again uncle told me). He observed, sweetly, that as a Christian allegory, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was obviously a bit of a failure. He felt instead that Lewis crammed into TLTW&TW all the things he loved from Christian, Greek and other mythologies.

The next few books aren't quite as astounding as the ones above, but each has, in Gaiman's sense, a Lewisian aspect.

Lev Grossman The Magicians

I'm not usually a fan of the 'Like a mixture of X and Y with a dash of Z' although I would make an exception for Luca Turin, who described a perfume as embodying the child Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller didn't have. But the reviewer who described The Magicians as the missing link between the Narnia books and Donna Tartt's The Secret History was on to something.

As soon as I read the opening page of 'The Magicians' I felt like I was reading along to a New Romantic soundtrack, all cutting observations and floppy fringes. Brilliant and unloved, 17-year-old Quentin Coldwater is still secretly yearning for the imaginary world of the British 1930s fantasy series he read as a child - and still covertly re-reads - to be real. Quentin would trade in his real existence for a magic wardrobe any day. And then it happens.

Scott Westerfeld Leviathan

Philip Pullman had daemons - Westerfeld has a alternate world where Darwin didn't just figure out evolution - he also invented genetic engineering. As a result Europe is poised on the brink of an equivalent to World War I, with the cultural lines drawn between the Clankers (the Austro-Hungary alliance which has developed a mechanical culture) and the British Allies who power their society with genetic splicing. Occasionally clunky writing (and terrible terrible fake swearing) is overcome by the sheer awesomeness of this vision.

Frances Hardinge The Lost Conspiracy (alternative title: Gullstruck Island)

When I read Elizabeth Knox's YA duo - the Dreamhunter books - I felt she'd failed to provide a sufficiently detailed, sufficiently strange alternate late-colonial New Zealand. The books just didn't have that lushness of imagination, that wealth of detail that you sink into, that The Hobbit or TLTW&TW have.

Hardinge is not short on invention. In fact, this book is relentlessly, overwhelmingly inventive. As an adult reader I felt occasionally overladen, but have you ever heard a kid who loves reading complain about a book being too long, or too full of remarkable things? I can't actually even begin to tell you what the books about - try the link above instead.


*Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle - first read when I was in my early teens - remains one of my favourite books. Writing that sentence reminds me of the part in the book when Thomas tells Cassandra that he knows Rose is not really in love with Stephen, because she never talks about him - people who are in love stop going on about the object of their affections. I Capture the Castle is, of course, a classic coming of age tale, and on reflection, that's the thread that binds all six of these books together.

Formalism two ways

To find Robert Heald's new gallery, you turn off Cuba Street into the Left Bank Arcade, and then head towards the light.

It's exciting to see a new dealer space open, especially when it's with a show of a new (or not-well-known-in-the-market) artist. Patrick Lundberg's altered found pieces make for a subtle but interesting inaugural exhibition - they're works that grow on you, that reward taking some time to observe. I'm looking forward to seeing more work by artists who so far I've only really had the chance to follow online.

A visit to the Adam Art Gallery to see the Anthony McCall show that closed over the weekend was less fun. If Lundberg's formalism is somehow warm and personal - a record of action, a kind of archaeology - then McCall's felt more coldly cerebral, a well-produced technical spectacle that somehow manages not to be at all affecting.

In his review, John Hurrell observes that on visiting the show "you realise that the online documentation of McCall’s sculptural work often looks slick, as if digitally tidied up and possibly a little bland." He goes on to say that "accidental components" bring an "unanticipated richness" to the experience.

I don't think these components - such as the fog machines - were in the least accidental, and I'd actually apply Hurrell's first sentence to the way I felt about the whole show. In an age where so much is technically possible, I sometimes feel it's getting harder for artists to distinguish what they do from other visual productions.



I don't think I'm arguing about hand-made versus digitally or mass-produced here, but more pondering how artists can continue to make objects or create experiences that stand out to you in a way that other things (or 'not-artworks') don't.

Images

Patrick Lundberg, installation view, Robert Heald Gallery, 2010. From the Robert Heald Gallery website.

Anthony McCall, Installation view of Breath (The Vertical Works) at Hangar Bicocca, Milan, 2009 (Photograph: Giulio Buono). From the Adam Art Gallery website.

Late at the X Gallery

"Late" nights - as opposed to extended opening hours - have become a feature of public programmes in New Zealand, with the Auckland Museum's well-regarded (and well publicised - hat-tip to that team) LATE at the Museum series perhaps being the best known.

This article from the NY Times offers an interesting perspective on the proliferation of after-hours events. Writer Chloe Veltman observes:

... a similitude often prevails: D.J.’s spinning electronic music, talks, art-house movies and the indispensable cash bar. An artistically satisfying after-hours event goes further than simply throwing together quirky attractions, like a modern-day version of a Victorian fun fair for young professionals. To stand out, the programming should make the art on display come to life in ways that are not necessarily possible when visitors are walking through exhibition halls during normal hours.

... Connecting evening events with the museum’s broader programming and aesthetic may not be a goal for all institutions. Some are more interested in creating fluid, abstract experiences that play on visitors’ desires to flit among a variety of attractions rather than deeply engage with a single idea. The trouble is that this approach tends to amplify the programs’ social aspects over the art. The events might bring in more young people, but they often don’t galvanize hearts and minds.

My first reaction was: yeah, deep engagement! I agree. And then I began to think - well, what's wrong with making our museums and galleries into social spaces that people use for all kinds of reason, not just for learning about and connecting with collection or exhibition items? What's wrong with me just dropping in for a cup of coffee and twenty minutes' free wifi, or a glass of wine and a gossip? If I don't "deeply engage" am I somehow a visitor failure?

UPDATE

A nicely apposite extract from the Guardian's Q&A with Nicolas Serota to mark the 10th anniversary of Tate Modern:

The past 10 years have seen an explosion of interest in contemporary art. Has art primarily become a form of entertainment?

No, but I was looking at something the other day that reminded me that, in the mid-19th century, Charles Eastlake, director of the National Gallery, spoke to a parliamentary select committee about how he kept seeing people in the National Gallery having picnics. He found it extraordinary that they had come in for reasons other than looking at art. The same kinds of complaint are made about people at Tate Modern. But they are here. They are finding out about themselves, they are looking at art – maybe out of the corner of their eye – but they learn something and come back. And that is all that really matters.

Artfest - a reprise

A few weeks ago I blogged about Rhizome's Seven on Seven event - a hackathon that paired artists and technologists to create something new in a short amount of time, and then present it at a public event.

The event took place over the past weekend. Rhizome has some photos up from the presentations, and promises video to come. The New York Times wrote up the event, as did Artforum.



The project that interested me the most was the collaboration between artist Tauba Auerbach and artist/engineer Ayah Bdeir. They proposed a moiré-pattern sculpture, which would reconfigure itself only when the room it's displayed in is empty - when someone enters the room, the sculpture freezes. I kind of dig this twist on interaction, where the lack of interaction creates movement and results in mystery.

Images
Tauba Auerbach, Untitled Fold Painting XII, 2010. Acrylic on canvas, 254 x 190.5 cm. Image from www.taubaauerbach.com
Presentation by Tauba Auerbach and Ayah Bdeir. Photo: Nick Hasty. From the Rhizome website.

Closure

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Eric Gill plaque of Ernest Rutherford that Russian physicist Pyotr Kapitza commissioned for the Mond Laboratory at Cambridge University in the early 1930s.

My blog post was a retelling of Chapter 7 in Mark Oliphant's Rutherford: Recollections of the Cambridge Days , which told the story of the controversy that surrounded Gill's portrait of Rutherford, after members of the faculty decided that the nose was too "Jewish".

I noted at the time that while I could find images of Gill's second work (a scraffito of a crocodile - Kapitsa's nickname for Rutherford) online, there were none available for the Rutherford plaque, making me wonder if it had disappeared.

A friend took up the cause, spoke to another friend, who spoke to another friend, who went out with a camera - the end of product of which being that I can now very happily present the following:







With thanks to Anthony Fox for the photographs, and Nat Torkington for the connections.

Coincidence

I just noticed that the tabs I have open for my lunch-time reading from the Guardian site bear a striking resemblance

Simon de Pury: the Mick Jagger of art auctions, by Stuart Jeffries

Interview with author Philip Pullman: 'I hope the wretched Catholic church will vanish entirely', by Laura Barton

Interview with publisher Andrew "the Jackal" Wylie, by Robert McCrum