Weekend reading

The New York Times yearly museum special section is a special treat (especially when it appears in the same day that the NYT reveals its paywall plans - woe, woe, woe). Here's what I'll be reading this weekend

The Spirit of Sharing, by Carol Vogel: about the ways museums are reaching out, and starting off with a profile of long-time hero, Shelley Bernstein

A Growing Use of Private Art in Public Spaces, by Judith Dobrynski: about the tensions of staging exhibitions of private collector's work.

Supplementing a Physical Collection, Online, by John Hanc: about hybrid museums that are more event and online-focused than centred on their buildings

Scent of a Museum, by Carol King: Chandler Burr curates a perfume exhibit (I bet you'd break out of the 'women, 45 plus' bracket if visitors to the show really did experience it by sniffing cute women)

Speaking digitally about museums, by Jennifer Preston: I'm hoping this isn't just a standard how-museums-use-social-media story

And the one I'm most excited about - An Interactive Exhibit for about $30, by Nick Bilton - using Arduino to make cheap in-gallery interpretative materials.

Judith Schalansky - Atlas of Remote Islands

Envy is not a pretty emotion. It makes you feel empty, and small. Thankfully my delight in Judith Schalansky's 'Atlas of Remote Islands' was great enough to overwhelm the occasional twinge of envy that she, and not I, has made something that I find so utterly covetable. (Made worse, let's be honest, when I just discovered that she's a year younger than me).

Of course, I couldn't have created this book: it grows entirely out of Schalansky's own self. Her discovery of the household atlas ...moreEnvy is not a pretty emotion. It makes you feel empty, and small. Thankfully my delight in Judith Schalansky's 'Atlas of Remote Islands' was great enough to overwhelm the occasional twinge of envy that she, and not I, has made something that I find so utterly covetable. (Made worse, let's be honest, when I just discovered that she's a year younger than me).

Of course, I couldn't have created this book: it grows entirely out of Schalansky's own self. Her discovery of the household atlas as an eight-year-old in East Germany - her incredulity that places out there exist:

I grew up with an atlas. And as a child of the atlas, I had never travelled. The fact that a girl in my class had actually been born in Helsinki felt unimaginable. ... To this day, I am baffled by Germans born, for example, in Nairobi or Los Angeles. Of course I know that Nairobi and Los Angeles exist - they are on the maps. But that someone has actually been there or even been born there still feels incredible to me.

her recognition early in life that maps depict only one of many stories:

Then I looked for my country: the German Democratic Republic. East Germans could not travel, only the Olympic team were allowed beyond our borders. It took a frighteningly long time to find. It was pink and tiny as my fingernail. This was hard to equate: at the Seoul Olympics we had been a force to reckon with, with had won more medals than the United States: how could we suddenly be so infinitesimal?

the sudden expanding of her horizons:

My love for atlases endured when a year later everything else changed: when it suddenly became possible to travel the world, and the country I was born in disappeared from the map. But by then I had already grown used to travelling through the atlas by finger, whispering foreign names to myself as I conquered distant worlds in my parents' sitting room.

Aesthetically, Schalansky's book is one of the most gorgeous things I've handled. This is another part of the uniqueness of her vision - it is all her work: writer, typographer, illustrator. She limits her palette to black, grey, plover-egg blue and brilliant orange, and then she makes magic within her own restrictions. Each double-page spread features on the right a scale drawing of the selected island, carefully etched with place names in fine cursive script; on the left, a catalogue of information, including alternate names, size, number of inhabitants or residents, distance from other land and a brief timeline (I am in love with the slanting lines of these of the distance measurements and timelines).

But the real magic is in the short pieces of text - almost prose poems - that accompany each of the 50 islands. The book is sub-titled 'Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will', and the entries lie somewhere between research and hallucination, like the author feel asleep over her papers and dreamed of these faraway places, awoke, and tried to capture that feeling of distance, strangeness, heat, cold, the incessant beat of the waves.

The tales range from Amelia Earhart's disappearance to a band of women stoving in a men's head with a shovel; killer crabs to infanticide; burning penguins to treasure maps. I limited myself to no more than five or six islands a day when reading the book, so I wouldn't become used to Schalansky's style and start skim reading. Instead, I tried to absorb each entry slowly, and to stay in her world. Every entry is in the present tense, whether the story is from the 1800s, the 2000s or an unnamed time - this lends them both an immediacy and a timelessness. My heart thrilled to some mentions - Thule has been part of my imagination since a childhood soaked in Rosemary Sutcliff's Roman Britain, Tristan da Cunha since sighting William Hodgkins' majestic oil paintings, the Scandinavian names feels strangely like home, a combination of poring over Norse myths and Roald Dahl's childhood biography.

I had to resist turning between each entry and a quick trip into Wikipedia to fact check and fill in the gaps. I'm glad now that I did, that rather than trying to turn the book into non-fiction I let it stay in the litterol space it was conceived in. I am happy to have that time inside Schalansky's imagination, and to let mine roam free too.

Social media, museums & artlovers

If you're an early riser, you might like to participate in a live Twitter session tomorrow morning (6am New Zealand time), organised by the New York Times and featuring the following luminaries:

• Shelley Bernstein, Brooklyn Museum @shell7
• Rob Stein, Indianapolis Museum of Art @rjstein
• Ian Padgham, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art @origiful
• Erin Coburn, Metropolitan Museum of Art @metmuseum

The hashtag is #nytmuseums. If, like me, you're unlikely to be glued to the screen at 6am, you'll be able to recap the conversation in this chat room.

Can we have these in New Zealand, please?

I heard about Christian Marclay's 24-hour film 'The Clock' via the Slate Culture Gabfest podcast. As described in the New York Times, Marclay

weaves together thousands of snippets from throughout the history of the movies (and, to a lesser extent, television), each clip marking the precise minute, or sometimes the second — with a glimpse of a clock or a watch or a snatch of time-related dialogue — in which the viewers are experiencing it in real time.

The film had people queuing for hours in the middle of the New York winter. The gallery where it was showing (Paula Cooper Gallery) did a decent thing and didn't limit the time people could spend in the space: thousands of people visited.




I would also love - really, really love - to have a Sol LeWitt wall drawing show in New Zealand. In many ways it seems like such an economically sound choice; no insurance, no couriers, no freighting, no expensive fitout. However, as this Walker Arts Center blog post makes clear, it would require days and days and days of painstaking work by experienced wall drawing executers. Still, it would be worth it. Those things sing and soar, beguile and bedazzle, intrigue and surprise you. I want.

Listen up

Two National Radio pieces I'm trying to get round to listening to, and you should as well:

Kim Hill interviews Michael Parekowhai and Cushla Parekowhai in the build-up to Michael's work going off to represent NZ at the Venice Biennale

Kathryn Ryan interviews Michael Edson Director of Web and New Media Strategy at the Smithsonian, and all-round delightful man.

Oliver Sacks - The Mind's Eye

From the occasional book reviews department

.........

I have this little mental game I play with myself to pass the time - when I'm walking or driving by myself, usually. If it had a name, it would probably be called something lame, like 'Choices'. In it, two or three options for a particular choice are available, and I have to justify to myself why I pick the option I do. It's like debating with myself, I guess, and it goes something like this:

Palmerston North, Wanganui, or Hamilton? (Hamilton)
Taller or thinner? (Taller)
Live to 70 or live to 80? (80)
Live to 80 or live to 90? (80)
Smarter or prettier? (Prettier)
Amputation or paralysis? (Amputation)
Paralysis or head injury? (Depends on the severity)

Oliver Sacks is a neurologist (if you don't know that already - he's up there with Dawkins in the recognisable scientists list, and I don't believe Richard Dawkins has ever been played by Robin Williams). This is Sack's 11th book, most of which are filled with case studies of his patients or correspondents, as he seeks to "show us what is often concealed in health: the complex workings of the brain and its astounding ability to adapt and overcome disability". 'The Mind's Eye', as the title suggests, is focused on brain damage - usually stroke - that leads to visual disorders.

'The Mind's Eye' had me playing a different kind of Choices. Blind or Deaf? (Deaf). Lose your stereoscopic or peripheral vision? (Stereoscopic). Prosopagnosia (inability to recognise faces and/or places) or alexia (inability to read)? (Alexia. Just. Agonisingly.)

It was the case studies of alexia that filled me with horror. I tried to imagine getting up one morning, flipping open the laptop, and not being able to read. Not just not able to piece together the letters of the alphabet, but not even recognising the alphabet. Having those 26 little shapes, so deeply engrained in my brain, appear as unfamiliar as Cyrillic script. Perhaps not only not being able to read, but suddenly, unable to write. Or worse yet, total - global - aphasia: the loss of the ability to process language in anyway, to make sense of words spoken to you, to speak, even, in some cases, to think. Sacks quotes psychologist Scott Moss, who had a stroke at 43 and became aphasic:

When I awoke next morning in the hospital, I was totally (globally) aphasic. I could understand vaguely what others said to me if it was spoken slowly and represented a very concrete form of action ... I had lost completely the ability to talk, to read and write. I even lost for the first two months the ability to use words internally, that is, in my thinking ... I had also lost the ability to dream. So, for a matter of eight to nine weeks, I lived in a total vacuum of self-produced concepts. ... I could deal only with the immediate present. ... The part of myself that was missing was [the] intellectual aspect - the sine qua non of my personality - those essential elements most important to being a unique individual. ... For a long period of time I looked upon myself as only half a man.

'The Mind's Eye' is Sacks' most intimate book yet. Not only does he talk about bis own prosopagnosia (so severe he may not recognise his assistant and friend of 20 years when she's waiting in a cafe for him, or be able to distinguish his face in a window from the face of a man on the other side, or remember how to get to his own house if he deviates from his familar path: qualities that have lead to him being described as everything from pathologically shy to having Aspergers Syndrome). But he devotes a long chapter, 'Persistence of Vision', to excerpts from the journal he kept after a malignant tumour appeared next to his fovea behind his retina in his right eye. The tumour was treated first by inserting a radioactive plaque for several days; then with several lasering sessions; he nonetheless lost his stereoscopic vision (depth perception) and a large chunk of his central vision: after a bleed, his lost his peripheral vision.

It seems a strange thing to say, but sight really matters to Sacks. From childhood (I thoroughly recommend his autobiography of his childhood, 'Uncle Tungsten', my favourite of his books). h has been obsessed with sight in all its manifestations, played out in photography and stereoscopy (he is a member of the New York Stereroscopic Society, a group that gets together to marvel over three-dimensional imaging). 'Persistence of Vision' tracks Sacks' experiences and feelings over several years, from sanguine to panicky to despairing. From the day he first noticed first a fluttering in his vision, and then a scotoma (blind spot), visits an opthamologist and is referred for a later appointment with a surgeon:

Back at my apartment that evening, testing my right eye, I was startled to see that the horizontal bars on the air conditioner all seemed to be warped, converging and collapsing into one another, while the vertical bars diverged. I cannot remember how I spent the rest of the weekend. I was very restless, I went for long walks, and when I was inside, I paced to and fro. The nights were especially bad - I had to knock myself out with sleeping pills.

Inevitably, self-pity seeps through: at Christmas he looks at the NYT list of people who died in 2005, and wonders if he will appear on the 2006 list. It's not really self-pity, though: it's part of the relentless self-examination he places himself under, tracking each change and quirk (his scotoma is the shape of Australia - “complete with a little bulge in the southeast corner — I thought of this as its Tasmania.”; he learns he can fill it in, with patterns from the carpet, the leaves of a tree, the blue of the sky).

Sacks' case studies have fascinated me since I first read them in my third year at uni, when taking a neuropsychology paper. One of the reasons I dropped psych and stuck with art history is the appalling damage psychologists and scientists have done, often inadvertently (but not always) as they seek to understand the human brain. You can't hurt anyone with art history, I reasoned. Sacks' humaneness though continues to shine though. Recommended, even if you just read the bits about himself.

Best search term bringing someone to this site in the past month

"basketball disappointments shane cotton"

Well, shit.

Over breakfast yesterday morning this article, about Vivian Schiller, the CEO of America's NPR, caught my eye in my feedreader. I skimmed over it, got excited about this section

Schiller’s style has succeeded somewhat in piercing NPR’s infamous bureaucracy. NPR correspondent Adam Davidson saw this firsthand when Schiller and he accomplished in one meeting what he had been unable to do for months inside the NPR management maze.

Davidson had participated in a rare NPR collaboration with a reporter from another public-media organization—Alex Blumberg of This American Life, which is produced by Chicago Public Radio and distributed by PRI—and the result had been a hit. “The Giant Pool of Money,” a masterfully clear and lively hour-long report on the causes of the housing crisis, aired in May 2008 on This American Life, the popular weekly show hosted by Ira Glass, and won an immediate outpouring of praise and several journalism awards. All Things Considered ran a shortened version of the story. Blumberg and Davidson proved radio could do long-form journalism about economics and finance that could excite and engage a broad, general audience. They wanted to keep doing it. But how?

Davidson and Blumberg came up with a concept for what they called Planet Money; it would be part blog, part podcast, part radio-reporting team. Davidson was NPR’s global economics correspondent but Blumberg, a producer for This American Life, didn’t work for NPR. And the multiplatform unit was neither a show, like All Things Considered or Morning Edition, nor was it a desk, like the business-news desk or the science desk. NPR is organized into shows and desks, apples and oranges. Planet Money was a kumquat.

and instapapered it for lunchtime reading.

Between getting to work and lunch, this article popped up in my feedreader ....



Gutted. Schiller - who, according to the first article, was doing some pretty amazing things at an institution that I admire and enjoy, has fallen on her sword after the top-flight fundraiser she brought in got taped criticising Republicans and Tea Partiers by people posing as potential donors (and, I suppose, Republican supporters). Impolitic at the best of times, and even more so when said party is trying to slash your budget.

That first article is well worth a read however: the challenges posed by a huge hide-bound institution that has a hundreds agitated stakeholders and a threatened budget, and the solutions Schiller found, are good lessons to all arts organisations right now.

Last night, I listened to a Slate Culture Gabfest, recorded on 9 March - so just before Schiller's resignation was announced. Farhad Manjoo was a guest on the show, talking about his recent piece in Slate on the complaint letters by NPR listeners. It's one of those classic American rants, but also an interesting insight into the audience growth and demographic for NPR - it's not what you might expect.

"The world of abstract art is more accessible than people realise"

At last science comes to the rescue of the arts, with a recent psychology study showing that actually, yes, people can often distinguish between abstract art and paint flung on a canvas by an elephant. Or a monkey. Or a four year-old.


Participants in the study were first shown 10 pairs of images, one by a bona fide artist (artists whose works were used in the study included Gillian Ayres, Helen Frankenthaler, Philip Guston, Hans Hoffman, Clyfford Still and Cy Twombly) with the signature erased, and one by a monkey/chimp/gorilla/elephant/child.

The next 20 pairs of images were half correctly labelled (child, artist, gorilla ...), and half mislabelled (for example, a work by an artist attributed to a gorilla).

From the paper's abstract

Participants preferred professional paintings and judged them as better than the nonprofessional paintings even when the labels were reversed. Art students preferred professional works more often than did nonart students, but the two groups’ judgments did not differ. Participants in both groups were more likely to justify their selections of professional than of nonprofessional works in terms of artists’ intentions. The world of abstract art is more accessible than people realize.

More details, and a table of results for those so inclined, here. And more on the methodology here.

The friend who sent me the link to the study observed that he'd be fascinated to see a similar exercise, but with participants asked to rank artworks in similar styles of similar subjects, by unknown/amateur artists and what I'll call - for lack of a single word - the-kind-of-artist-who-gets-an-exhibition-at-Auckland-Art-Gallery-or-is-represented-by-Hamish-McKay. This made me think: would a watercolour of irises by Flora No-Name rank more highly than one by Rita Angus? Would it matter if it did?

Whenever I try to defend the way the art world works to my non-art friends, I flounder and founder. All I can say is that artworld consensus - in the shape of the major public galleries, dealers, critics, auction houses and academics - place artists on a series of concentric circles, the innermost of which is blue-chip/genius/blockbuster/artists for the ages, and the outermost is you, at home, noodling about on a piece of paper while you're stuck in a phone queue. Some - like Henry Darger - will traverse the lines, but only rarely. Some will move from the innermost circle outwards as their reputation falls, and some will move inwards; extrapolate that over centuries, and you've got art history. But we'll only ever be able to explain and defend this with words and never - the study above aside - science.

Image, from Psychology Today
Left: a painting by 4-year-old named Jack Pezanosky. Right: Laburnum, by Hans Hoffman.

Websites websites websites

As noted at Over the Net, Hamish Keith, working with Katipo and using the Kete software, have put together a site for people to record artworks, antiques and other objects at risk in Christchurch - LostArtChch.org.nz

I'm building up towards a piece on iPhone and iPad apps for looking at art - in the meantime, have a look at the newish, heavily social/interactive artfinder site (and Jonathan Jones' review in the Guardian). Jones categorised the artfinder site as an 'online museum', a move the site's creators responded to in a blog post

There’s one thing we wanted to correct though and that is that we’re not an online museum. We’re a website. Museums are special, magical places and not all online things have to be an analogue of a real world thing. We’re proud to be a website, it’s what we always set out to be. There are points when we’ll do museum-like things. We’ll curate, juxtapose, hopefully inform, delight and convene. But these are things that websites can do too. What we hope to be is a website where related works from disparate museums can be brought together so you can find more art and artists that you love. We could spend all our time trying to replicate every minute facet of the museum experience in a virtual space, but that’s not the intention of Artfinder. The intention is to be a new way to find and collate and share the art you love and we feel the best vehicle for that is a website. There are other parts of the service that we’re working on at the moment where the best vehicle may either be an app on a smartphone, or an app on a tablet device. These won’t be analogues of museums either, they’ll be their own things, but essentially, they’ll be apps and we’ll be proud of that fact as well.

Also recentish - the Guardian's book site for children (which looks remarkably like its books section for adults, but which is aimed at 7 year-olds up to teenagers, and encourages them to write for and interact on the site). If you prefer your reviews by adults, the New York Times archive of children's book reviews is quite something.

Making it real

I remain fascinated by digital things that are re-released into the world as physical objects.



Over the weekend on the New Yorker site, Ian Crouch blogged about Tweets from Tahrir, an edited collection of tweets from the popular revolution that overthrew Murabak in Egypt:

Alex Nunns, a British journalist, and Nadia Idle, an Egyptian who was on the ground in Cairo during the protests, began archiving tweets as they were posted, and have been combing through feeds ever since to build a portrait of, as Nunns tweeted in February, a “1st draft [of] history.”

Crouch's piece makes some interesting points about how collections like this function in the traditional publishing model, asking whether the publishers are paying the original tweeters (no - the relationship, says the publisher, is with the editors, although the tweeters have been contacted and have given their permission).

Brock Shinen, an intellectual property and entertainment lawyer, has written that tweets could rarely, if ever, be protected, largely because they trade mostly in facts, which do not fall under copyright. So tweets from Cairo, such as “OMG, Mubarak’s thugs are storming the square on camels!,” might provide a thrilling glimpse into events as they were happening, but they are just short communications of observable fact. Even an incisive tweet: “Egypt’s revolution most important since 1989,” likely lacks the originality or creativity to be protected. Yet the content of tweets may not be entirely given over to the world; a ruling last year in the case of a Haitian photographer whose Twitpics had been printed by several news agencies, including Agence France-Presse, without permission or payment rejected AFP’s claim that printing a photograph was the same as retweeting someone’s post. Twitter users may retain certain rights, though it’s unclear as to how generally applicable this case will be.

I realised when reading this that one of my own tweets has already been collated into a print book. In February 2009 Carl Malamud ran for the position of Public Printer in the States on a platform of open data, and gathered tweets in support of his application into a PDF and printed book. I have a copy of the print book at home. My tweet is on the second page. Malamud didn't become Public Printer, but it was an early intimation for me of what being connected to something big could feel like on Twitter.




Another - rather exquisite - example of this physical/digital, activism-linked trend is James Bridle's print edition of every edit to the Wikipedia page about the Iraq War between December 2004 and September 2009.

It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead”.

This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.

And for the first time in history, we’re building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future.

Web muster

An enjoyable article by Joe Keohane for Slate, asking why pickpocketing is dying out in the States (and why culture at large holds a lingering admiration for this form of petty theft).


These photos strike me as teetering, Riefenstahl-esque, on the border of beautiful and creepy: a photodocumentary by Luke Duggleby Ron Gluckman in Foreign Policy about the Bangkok-based Dhammakaya movement.

A must-read: Gerald Marzorati (former New York Times Magazine editor) and Mark Danner (former New Yorker writer) on 'the fate of long-form journalism in a new media age':

One of the things that’s really taken off in the last 10-15 years: The public has a hunger to actually encounter the writers who are writing these pieces. One of the ways nonfiction writers are able to make money — not all nonfiction writers, but a fair number of them — is on the lecture tour. A kind of 19th century idea, the book as a loss leader for actually going out and encountering people.

You can check out more by Gerald Marzorati on the topic here.

Greater love hath no man than this, that he will set up a piss-take Twitter account: an Atlantic interview with the man behind Mayor Emanuel