Covid, of course
A beautifully imagined and written piece by Rebekah White in New Zealand Geographic, 'Our New Future', a non-sensational take on what the coming months could look like, in the scenarios of a second outbreak, or where the virus is contained or eliminated.
American museum consultant Dan Spock (a very considered person) thinks through the Post-Coronavirus Museum
From the Art Newspaper, 'There is no fast track back to normal': museums confront economic fallout of the pandemic - follow this overview up with the indepth podcast, with long interviews with Frances Morris (Tate), Dan Weiss (The Met) and Philip Tinari (UCCA Center for Contemporary Art Beijing).
Not Covid specifically, but interesting data
The Mapping Museum research project based at Birkbeck University of London looked at the explosion of museums in the UK in the second half of the 20th century, and sought to document and analyse how the sector changed between 1960 and 2020. Their website has a variety of articles and research reports, including the just released Mapping Museums 1960–2020: A report on the data which includes the top-line finding "758 museums have closed, which is 18.7% of the total number of museums open since 1960. The assumption that museums survive and that they keep collections for posterity is misplaced."
Not Covid, just heartbreaking
Letters reveal postnatal crisis of Barbara Hepworth - from the Observer, I've read this story about four times and each time it just wrecks me. Don't read it if you're not feeling resilient.
Not Covid, just nostalgia
Midwest - a brief but brightly burning publication coming out of the John McCormack / Robert Leonard Govett-Brewster - has been scanned and put online by the gallery (except one issue, waiting for John to have access to his storage post-lockdown)
Saturday, 25 April 2020
Sunday, 19 April 2020
Reading list, 19 April 2020
Covid-19, of course
New NZ thinktank Koi Tū's paper on the questions the pandemic should be prompting us to ask for the future. And The Great Reset: What Will (Need to) Change after the Crisis? from a House of Beautiful Business Living Room Session (whatever that is?). Long pieces I'll come back to post the Monday announcement, I reckon.
From NiemanLab: The coronavirus traffic bump to news sites is pretty much over already (American, of course, I'm not sure where NZ is at. Check out the most recent episode of The Fold in which The Spinoff editor Duncan Grieve pondered the Covid-19 impact on the media on March 27, a monologue that still holds up)
Covid-19 and magical thinking defence mechanisms
Moving beyond the content-frenzy: Andrew McIntyre of audience research company MHM in the first of three articles about becoming more audience-focused post-Covid
McIntyre links to this interesting piece by Nicholas Berger, The Forgotten Art of Assembly Or, Why Theatre Makers Should Stop Making: "These immediate, ad hoc, digital projects highlight not a resiliency, but a deep fear. The coronavirus has exposed us all, desperately afraid of being alone."
Let's zoom out on that one. This week I was sent this article by a friend, Why Are You Panic-Working? Try This Instead by organisational psychologist Gianpiero Petriglieri. He gives a psychological framework for this productivity response, the "manic defense", outlined by Donald Winnicott in the early 20th century. Petriglieri writes:
Like all defenses, the obsession with staying productive is a source of dubious comfort. It sustains the pretense that if we work hard enough, we can hold onto the world we once knew.
It shields us from feeling powerless in the face of events, but it comes at a high price. It costs us our connection to reality, to our experience, and to others. We become incapable of appraising the situation, acknowledging our feelings about it, and being present to others. We become numb. Eventually, we fall apart because we have tried too hard to keep ourselves together.
How we respond when placed under pressure is something I've been intrigued about ever since I drove my car over a small cliff as a teenager (long background story) and never more so than this past month. Call me late to the party (like, arriving a solid 10 years after it started) but I've just started listening to Brené Brown's podcast 'Unlocking Us'. The episode on anxiety, and people's tendency to either over or under-perform when placed under pressure is full of commonsense and good reminders, and links well to Petriglieri's article.
Covid as a springboard for writing about new cultural artefacts
Using Barbie to stage mini-protests: I usually hate art gallery stunts, this is genius. "That's not art it's Victorian porn!' – how one small Barbie doll took on the art world", Nancy Langham-Hooper's interview with Sarah Williamson, creator of ArtActivistBarbie.
Simon Wilson reviews Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light, (paywalled) asking what we can learn from Thomas Cromwell's life and times to apply to our current moment: "Power, wielded successfully, is about matching ambition to circumstance. Doing what you can, knowing how to play the long game but also seize the moment. You can't just do what you want. You have to do it so it works."
Not at all Covid
A 2019 piece from The New York Times by Caity Weaver, on the office design of the company that runs a bunch of America's mall food chains.
Also from the Times: Sarah Miller's lengthy analysis you didn't know you needed of Claire Danes' character's attachment to cross-body bags in Homeland.
Bonus reading fest
This massive New York Times T Magazine's 2020 Culture Issue. I particularly enjoyed the article about butch and stud lesbian style / identity.
Bonus reading fest
This massive New York Times T Magazine's 2020 Culture Issue. I particularly enjoyed the article about butch and stud lesbian style / identity.
Monday, 13 April 2020
Reading list, 13 April 2020
Cultural sector
Colleen Dilenschneider is releasing regular updates to the (American) audience surveys about appetite to return to cultural organisations after lock-down
The National Library of New Zealand on how they're documenting online life during Covid-19
The best piece I've read so far on abruptly moving to working with remote teams, by Mandy Brown
This Happy Museum piece is good - How might museums help us navigate beyond our current crisis? - but actually I really liked how they presented it as a Twitter thread
From Mass Action: How Are We [Museums] Centering Equity in this Time?
Leadership
This (short) reframing of the idea of "accountability" in the workplace has really helped me deal with a word I usually find to be weaponised.
This tweet thread from whoever @LewSOS is (apologies Lew) is really interesting. The observation is that we are all getting much the same data right now, but the speed at which you can form and announce an opinion based on that data, compared to the speed at which you can form and announce an implementation plan based on that data, are quite different.
Three reasons why Jacinda Ardern’s coronavirus response has been a masterclass in crisis leadership: direction-giving, meaning-making and empathy.
Deloitte's think piece: thrive scenarios for resilient leaders - different ways the world might come out of Covid-19 (more or less trust in government, technology, other people ...)
Feelings
I keep returning to this piece by Emma Pattee in the New York Times: The Difference Between Worry, Stress and Anxiety
Every couple of days I also contemplate this graphic (which I can't find an original source for):
With a lot more walking in my life, I'm doing a lot more podcast listening nowadays, including RNZ's Coronavirus podcast (I enjoy their focused approach) but most especially How's Work? with Esther Perel, from Gimlet Media (the workplace counselling podcast you didn't know you needed in your life).
Light relief
The social media phenomena of people recreating portraits in their own homes has been pretty great, but I truly applaud my friend (and cultural sector champion Glen Barnes) for this one:
Colleen Dilenschneider is releasing regular updates to the (American) audience surveys about appetite to return to cultural organisations after lock-down
The National Library of New Zealand on how they're documenting online life during Covid-19
The best piece I've read so far on abruptly moving to working with remote teams, by Mandy Brown
This Happy Museum piece is good - How might museums help us navigate beyond our current crisis? - but actually I really liked how they presented it as a Twitter thread
From Mass Action: How Are We [Museums] Centering Equity in this Time?
Leadership
This (short) reframing of the idea of "accountability" in the workplace has really helped me deal with a word I usually find to be weaponised.
This tweet thread from whoever @LewSOS is (apologies Lew) is really interesting. The observation is that we are all getting much the same data right now, but the speed at which you can form and announce an opinion based on that data, compared to the speed at which you can form and announce an implementation plan based on that data, are quite different.
Three reasons why Jacinda Ardern’s coronavirus response has been a masterclass in crisis leadership: direction-giving, meaning-making and empathy.
Deloitte's think piece: thrive scenarios for resilient leaders - different ways the world might come out of Covid-19 (more or less trust in government, technology, other people ...)
Feelings
I keep returning to this piece by Emma Pattee in the New York Times: The Difference Between Worry, Stress and Anxiety
Every couple of days I also contemplate this graphic (which I can't find an original source for):
With a lot more walking in my life, I'm doing a lot more podcast listening nowadays, including RNZ's Coronavirus podcast (I enjoy their focused approach) but most especially How's Work? with Esther Perel, from Gimlet Media (the workplace counselling podcast you didn't know you needed in your life).
Light relief
The social media phenomena of people recreating portraits in their own homes has been pretty great, but I truly applaud my friend (and cultural sector champion Glen Barnes) for this one:
#MuseumChallenge time. Billy Apple 2 Minutes, 33 Seconds, complete with bonus receipt for the 🍎— Glen Barnes (@barnaclebarnes) April 13, 2020
/c @Te_Papa @auchmill pic.twitter.com/zAeXLRqjXj
Saturday, 14 March 2020
Preface for "The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and Provocations"
I was very touched, and honoured, to be invited by Suse Anderson and Keir Winesmith last year to write a preface for their book The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and Provocations (Routledge, 2020).
Keir and Suse are two of my favourite Australians, two of my favourite Australian - American (and in Keir's case, back in Australia again) transplants, two of my favourite digital museum people, and two of my valued friends formed through years of association with the National Digital Forum. I've benefited for more than a decade now from their incredible generosity of thought, and the way they take a show-your-workings approach to going about their research and mahi, opening that up for all interested people.
The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and Provocations is made up of facilitated conversations between pairs of thinkers and (mostly museum) practitioners. Starting from the swathing changes wrought by the widespread adoption of digital technology in society and in museums, as the blurb states, the book "offers provocations and reflections about effective practice that will help prepare today’s museums for tomorrow, culminating in a set of competing possible visions for the future of the museum sector."
The book includes 12 conversations, between people including Seph Rodney & Robert J. Stein, LaToya Devezin & Barbara Makuati-Afitu, Shelley Bernstein & Seb Chan, and Tony Butler & Lori Fogarty. Throughout, Suse and Keir add their own prompts, and two pieces that frame the conversations.
I've read the whole thing, and it is illuminating, personalised, striking in its cultural differences, and powerful in its quality of thinking. I couldn't recommend it to you more.
Preface to The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and Provocations
The distinguishing characteristic of the people leading practice in the development of 'digital' in museums is, I believe, that they are given to both action and theory, with a healthy side in activism. Many other industries and occupations combine a strong theoretical aspect with hands-on practice, but I see something unique in the way people who work on the web create, theorise, and connect, perhaps because the mechanism we connect through is also the stuff we create with.
The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and Provocations is, for me, a book about thinking. It's a book that brings into conversation a group of thinkers who characteristically do their thinking in public. The body of knowledge captured in these conversations has grown largely through the mechanisms of conferences, blogs and social media; indeed, it is through these channels that Keir Winesmith and Suse Anderson first encountered many of the contributors. As Seb Chan observes in his conversation with Shelley Bernstein, when Keir asks why both have such a commitment to working "in the open":
This ethos of thinking in public is fueled by tremendous generosity, another characteristic of this community. It is also an approach that takes advantage of the democratising effects of the internet. In this new paradigm it's not the brand name of the institution you're affiliated to but the quality of your contribution that matters. As Seb also observes, this has been particularly important for those of us working in or alongside cultural institutions beyond the traditional centres of power and attention. In the first wave of museum/digital practice, it was the voices of those people working outside the dominant centres of geographical and institutional power that had new power to be heard. Today, it's voices from beyond the dominant cultures - communities that have traditionally been marginalised, silenced or spoken for by the museum - that are at the forefront of changing museum practice.
The Digital Future of Museums is also a book about museums as generators and conduits of thinking. Seph Rodney identifies in his conversation with Robert Stein that museums play an important role in "having us think about our thinking, publicly". Museums reflect and shape the perspectives of nations, societies, communities and individuals about their histories, their cultures, their politics, biases, and view of the future. By driving a museum's intellectual agenda funders, management, and staff create the stories and imagery that inform (or confirm, or challenge) how a society thinks about itself. This is why museums are not, and can never be, neutral. It is also why they are such exciting and meaningful - and occasionally hazardous - places to work.
I first encountered Seph’s writing in 2016, in a piece he wrote for Hyperallergic, based on his PhD research. In the essay, Seph traces a progression in museums from the late 19th century paradigm of the specialist collecting institution, to the post-Second World War paradigm of the educational institution, to the 21st century paradigm of the visitor-centred museum. In the contemporary context, personalisation has succeeded education. The visitor is no longer seen by the museum as an incidental beneficiary of its core focus on collecting and categorisation, no longer viewed as a passive recipient of authoritative curatorial knowledge, but invited to be an active participant, making their own meaning from the museum's offerings.
Seph attributes the change over the past 25 years to an intertwined set of economic, social, political and museological changes. The emergence of the new museology has placed the visitor at the centre of museum practice; cultural policies (largely in countries where museums are publicly funded) have pushed museums towards new success measures based around access and economic contribution; and the rise of the experience economy has led to the creation of museum experiences designed for consumption, according to the user/visitor's needs and desires. This framework provides a thought-provoking context in which to locate the 13 discussions that make up The Digital Future of Museums. The concerns of people leading digital change in our museums far exceed questions of what file format to use, or whether it's AR or VR we should bank on for visitor appeal. Within these conversations, we can see leading thinkers analysing in real time some of the greatest limitations and opportunities that museums as social structures and services are working through today.
Throughout the conversations, you'll notice contributors offering different versions of a similar refrain: digital isn't a technology, it's a way of working; digital isn't a technology, it's a language; digital isn't special, it's just what is. This refrain brings us to the heart of this book: the fruitful, fascinating, and fast-paced ways in which the development of contemporary digital technology has interfaced with contemporary museum thinking.
Like the earliest iteration of the museum, the internet was initially a research tool used by specialists and those with privileged access to (computing) power. When Tim Berners-Lee began development of the World Wide Web in 1989, his goal was to make the internet "a collaborative medium, a place where we can all meet and read and write". With the launch of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, the internet went mainstream: now, anyone with an internet connection could 'surf' this massive new global resource for information and entertainment. At this point however, publishing power was still limited: the means of creating and consuming content were separated. The web, in some ways, was in the second museum paradigm: a place where those with access to the tools of publishing fed content and knowledge to those who primarily consumed without contributing back. We can map the beginnings of digitised collections to this moment, and the new ability for all museums to think massively beyond their local remit into global reach.
It was at the turn of the 21st century, with the rise of blogging and wiki platforms and the integration of publishing tools into the medium, that Berners-Lee's vision was fulfilled: the web as a two-way system, where 'ordinary' people could contribute content as easily as they accessed it. This was the read/write web: a medium capable of being displayed (read) and also modified (write). The congruence here between the new affordances of the web and the new approaches to exhibition and experience design fascinate me; all fed by people's growing expectations that their experiences and opinions warrant recognition and sharing.
In 2005 Tim O'Reilly published 'What is Web 2.0', an analysis of design patterns and business models that he saw underlying the companies that had survived the 2001 dot-com bubble burst. The codification of Web 2.0 highlighted collaborative services, "harnessing the collective intelligence", and the power of user-generated content. This was the age of Wikipedia and Flickr; of folksonomies and tagging; of RSS and viral marketing. It's when Time magazine made its 2006 Person of the Year You, recognising the millions of individuals who were now populating the web's content, and when ideas of co-creation, co-curation and community participation went mainstream in museums.
Writing in 2017, technology commentator Alexis Madrigal observed that "Web 2.0 was not just a temporal description, but an ethos". It was a picture of the truly open web; an almost Utopian vision of humankind working together for global betterment. "But then", writes Madrigal,
Today, the ground has shifted again. As Adriel Luis observes in his conversation with Sarah Brin, over this intervening period "museum conferences everywhere have gravitated towards the theme of social change". The sector is asking itself hard questions about impact, social change and social justice. Within this questioning, there is a growing awareness that in their efforts to decolonise themselves - to cast off their colonialist and imperialist origins - museums may fall into perpetuating a form of neo-colonialism, often in the attempt to fulfil the vision of universal knowledge they were founded upon.
Sarah Kenderdine touches on the tension between the value museums place on access to heritage and knowledge and the growing understanding of the prejudice of this attitude in her conversation with Merete Sanderhoff. Talking about the creation of high-resolution digital facsimiles of heritage objects, she notes:
As we look to the future then, I recommend one particular chapter in this book to all readers. The conversation between LaToya Devezin and Barbara Makuati-Afitu shows, in applied practice, ways of working that could and should form the culture of museums of the future. LaToya, in her discussion of working with African American and other communities, describes a post-custodial model of museum and archival practice, where emphasis is placed not on the physical housing of the object, but the preservation of a community's culture and stories: of the institution being of service. Barbara, when asked what is required for institutions to respect and protect the stories and knowledge communities chose to share with them, replies, "It's someone fully understanding culturally and spiritually the sacredness of that knowledge that isn't ours, that isn't mine, and wanting to know how we can help - using different platforms - to ensure its safety." And when asked at the conclusion of the conversation what museums may look like in 20 years' time if they follow these practices, LaToya concludes:
Keir and Suse are two of my favourite Australians, two of my favourite Australian - American (and in Keir's case, back in Australia again) transplants, two of my favourite digital museum people, and two of my valued friends formed through years of association with the National Digital Forum. I've benefited for more than a decade now from their incredible generosity of thought, and the way they take a show-your-workings approach to going about their research and mahi, opening that up for all interested people.
The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and Provocations is made up of facilitated conversations between pairs of thinkers and (mostly museum) practitioners. Starting from the swathing changes wrought by the widespread adoption of digital technology in society and in museums, as the blurb states, the book "offers provocations and reflections about effective practice that will help prepare today’s museums for tomorrow, culminating in a set of competing possible visions for the future of the museum sector."
The book includes 12 conversations, between people including Seph Rodney & Robert J. Stein, LaToya Devezin & Barbara Makuati-Afitu, Shelley Bernstein & Seb Chan, and Tony Butler & Lori Fogarty. Throughout, Suse and Keir add their own prompts, and two pieces that frame the conversations.
I've read the whole thing, and it is illuminating, personalised, striking in its cultural differences, and powerful in its quality of thinking. I couldn't recommend it to you more.
Preface to The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and Provocations
The distinguishing characteristic of the people leading practice in the development of 'digital' in museums is, I believe, that they are given to both action and theory, with a healthy side in activism. Many other industries and occupations combine a strong theoretical aspect with hands-on practice, but I see something unique in the way people who work on the web create, theorise, and connect, perhaps because the mechanism we connect through is also the stuff we create with.
The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and Provocations is, for me, a book about thinking. It's a book that brings into conversation a group of thinkers who characteristically do their thinking in public. The body of knowledge captured in these conversations has grown largely through the mechanisms of conferences, blogs and social media; indeed, it is through these channels that Keir Winesmith and Suse Anderson first encountered many of the contributors. As Seb Chan observes in his conversation with Shelley Bernstein, when Keir asks why both have such a commitment to working "in the open":
For me it's about working in public. I grew up with the web, and this notion of ‘viewing source code’ has infused my philosophy around lots of things. That we all get better if we share information, and we bring the other generations along with us. And it is about transparency and openness as a differentiator, too. I found that early on at Powerhouse. It was a way of creating an international network of peers and peer institutions that we could bounce ideas off and share information with.Research, experimentation, documentation and reflection: by talking not only about what they are doing, but how and why they are doing it, and what they have learned from doing it - at an unprecedented volume, unhampered by the publishing schedules or peer review of academic journals - these thinkers have shaped the discourse around museums in a new, powerful and rapid way. Moreover, this discourse has been shaped by interactivity from the outset: blogs were made to be commented on and hyperlinked; wikis to be edited; social media posts to be shared and replied to. This is one of the reasons the interview format adopted in The Digital Future of Museums serves its contributors and its readers so well: it supports the collaborative development of ideas fostered by the best online engagements, as well as humour, respectful disagreement, and new insights.
This ethos of thinking in public is fueled by tremendous generosity, another characteristic of this community. It is also an approach that takes advantage of the democratising effects of the internet. In this new paradigm it's not the brand name of the institution you're affiliated to but the quality of your contribution that matters. As Seb also observes, this has been particularly important for those of us working in or alongside cultural institutions beyond the traditional centres of power and attention. In the first wave of museum/digital practice, it was the voices of those people working outside the dominant centres of geographical and institutional power that had new power to be heard. Today, it's voices from beyond the dominant cultures - communities that have traditionally been marginalised, silenced or spoken for by the museum - that are at the forefront of changing museum practice.
The Digital Future of Museums is also a book about museums as generators and conduits of thinking. Seph Rodney identifies in his conversation with Robert Stein that museums play an important role in "having us think about our thinking, publicly". Museums reflect and shape the perspectives of nations, societies, communities and individuals about their histories, their cultures, their politics, biases, and view of the future. By driving a museum's intellectual agenda funders, management, and staff create the stories and imagery that inform (or confirm, or challenge) how a society thinks about itself. This is why museums are not, and can never be, neutral. It is also why they are such exciting and meaningful - and occasionally hazardous - places to work.
I first encountered Seph’s writing in 2016, in a piece he wrote for Hyperallergic, based on his PhD research. In the essay, Seph traces a progression in museums from the late 19th century paradigm of the specialist collecting institution, to the post-Second World War paradigm of the educational institution, to the 21st century paradigm of the visitor-centred museum. In the contemporary context, personalisation has succeeded education. The visitor is no longer seen by the museum as an incidental beneficiary of its core focus on collecting and categorisation, no longer viewed as a passive recipient of authoritative curatorial knowledge, but invited to be an active participant, making their own meaning from the museum's offerings.
Seph attributes the change over the past 25 years to an intertwined set of economic, social, political and museological changes. The emergence of the new museology has placed the visitor at the centre of museum practice; cultural policies (largely in countries where museums are publicly funded) have pushed museums towards new success measures based around access and economic contribution; and the rise of the experience economy has led to the creation of museum experiences designed for consumption, according to the user/visitor's needs and desires. This framework provides a thought-provoking context in which to locate the 13 discussions that make up The Digital Future of Museums. The concerns of people leading digital change in our museums far exceed questions of what file format to use, or whether it's AR or VR we should bank on for visitor appeal. Within these conversations, we can see leading thinkers analysing in real time some of the greatest limitations and opportunities that museums as social structures and services are working through today.
Throughout the conversations, you'll notice contributors offering different versions of a similar refrain: digital isn't a technology, it's a way of working; digital isn't a technology, it's a language; digital isn't special, it's just what is. This refrain brings us to the heart of this book: the fruitful, fascinating, and fast-paced ways in which the development of contemporary digital technology has interfaced with contemporary museum thinking.
Like the earliest iteration of the museum, the internet was initially a research tool used by specialists and those with privileged access to (computing) power. When Tim Berners-Lee began development of the World Wide Web in 1989, his goal was to make the internet "a collaborative medium, a place where we can all meet and read and write". With the launch of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, the internet went mainstream: now, anyone with an internet connection could 'surf' this massive new global resource for information and entertainment. At this point however, publishing power was still limited: the means of creating and consuming content were separated. The web, in some ways, was in the second museum paradigm: a place where those with access to the tools of publishing fed content and knowledge to those who primarily consumed without contributing back. We can map the beginnings of digitised collections to this moment, and the new ability for all museums to think massively beyond their local remit into global reach.
It was at the turn of the 21st century, with the rise of blogging and wiki platforms and the integration of publishing tools into the medium, that Berners-Lee's vision was fulfilled: the web as a two-way system, where 'ordinary' people could contribute content as easily as they accessed it. This was the read/write web: a medium capable of being displayed (read) and also modified (write). The congruence here between the new affordances of the web and the new approaches to exhibition and experience design fascinate me; all fed by people's growing expectations that their experiences and opinions warrant recognition and sharing.
In 2005 Tim O'Reilly published 'What is Web 2.0', an analysis of design patterns and business models that he saw underlying the companies that had survived the 2001 dot-com bubble burst. The codification of Web 2.0 highlighted collaborative services, "harnessing the collective intelligence", and the power of user-generated content. This was the age of Wikipedia and Flickr; of folksonomies and tagging; of RSS and viral marketing. It's when Time magazine made its 2006 Person of the Year You, recognising the millions of individuals who were now populating the web's content, and when ideas of co-creation, co-curation and community participation went mainstream in museums.
Writing in 2017, technology commentator Alexis Madrigal observed that "Web 2.0 was not just a temporal description, but an ethos". It was a picture of the truly open web; an almost Utopian vision of humankind working together for global betterment. "But then", writes Madrigal,
in June of 2007, the iPhone came out. Thirteen months later, Apple’s App Store debuted. Suddenly, the most expedient and enjoyable way to do something was often tapping an individual icon on a screen. As smartphones took off, the amount of time that people spent on the truly open web began to dwindle. ... The great cathedrals of that time, nearly impossible projects like Wikipedia that worked and worked well, have all stagnated.Madrigal's analysis matches with a feeling I developed in 2015, as I toured around museums in seven American states studying digitally-enhanced visitor experiences. Overall, as I visited the museums leading in this space, I observed a move away from projects focused on global audiences, and a move towards personalised experiences delivered via smartphones and customised devices available onsite at the museum. While these new experiences were often rich, subtle and playful – and designed to collect information that helped institution learn more about the behaviour and motivations of physical visitors – this shift in focus from global to local seemed to be paired with a reduction in sector-wide, collaborative endeavours. I asked myself at the time if this was a natural consequence of digital leaders’ roving curiosity: that the opportunities of collaborative platforms, APIs, metadata sharing and so on had been thoroughly explored, and new ground opened up for exploration. I also quietly questioned whether museum leadership and external funders had abandoned the altruism encouraged by the open web environment, and were now more inclined to support projects where the benefits could be firmly located within the museum’s walls.
Today, the ground has shifted again. As Adriel Luis observes in his conversation with Sarah Brin, over this intervening period "museum conferences everywhere have gravitated towards the theme of social change". The sector is asking itself hard questions about impact, social change and social justice. Within this questioning, there is a growing awareness that in their efforts to decolonise themselves - to cast off their colonialist and imperialist origins - museums may fall into perpetuating a form of neo-colonialism, often in the attempt to fulfil the vision of universal knowledge they were founded upon.
Sarah Kenderdine touches on the tension between the value museums place on access to heritage and knowledge and the growing understanding of the prejudice of this attitude in her conversation with Merete Sanderhoff. Talking about the creation of high-resolution digital facsimiles of heritage objects, she notes:
Critics look at this as a kind of massive cultural appropriation or neo-colonialism that the digital has unleashed in the documentation of other cultures, under a banner of heritage at risk. It's an extraordinary moment. It's not like iconoclasm is new, but now it's in the public domain. We are able to create phenomenal amounts of digital data, but it does come with this overtone of neo-colonialism.The same point is raised in a response signed by over 100 scholars and practitioners in intellectual property law and material and digital cultural heritage to the 2018 Sarr-Savoy Report, which recommended to the French government the restitution of African material culture from French museums to colonised countries. The response challenges the report's recommendation that all items identified for return should be systematically digitised and made available online, arguing that "the report’s recommendations, if followed, risk placing the French government in a position of returning Africa’s Material Cultural Heritage while retaining control over the generation, presentation, and stewardship of Africa’s digital cultural heritage for decades to come."
As we look to the future then, I recommend one particular chapter in this book to all readers. The conversation between LaToya Devezin and Barbara Makuati-Afitu shows, in applied practice, ways of working that could and should form the culture of museums of the future. LaToya, in her discussion of working with African American and other communities, describes a post-custodial model of museum and archival practice, where emphasis is placed not on the physical housing of the object, but the preservation of a community's culture and stories: of the institution being of service. Barbara, when asked what is required for institutions to respect and protect the stories and knowledge communities chose to share with them, replies, "It's someone fully understanding culturally and spiritually the sacredness of that knowledge that isn't ours, that isn't mine, and wanting to know how we can help - using different platforms - to ensure its safety." And when asked at the conclusion of the conversation what museums may look like in 20 years' time if they follow these practices, LaToya concludes:
We're going to have a more multidimensional viewpoint of history, and I think we can really affect social change. We'll have more diversity within our staffs, and a more enriching experience as a whole. I feel like our space will be more transformative over time, and that we can grow with each other, and maybe it will give us the space to have some of those difficult conversations to be able to foster change. If we all could participate in conversations like the conversation that we're having now, I can see it being such a beautiful and wonderful process.The beauty of this book is being invited into these conversations in this moment. On behalf of all its readers in the future, I give my thanks to the generosity of all those who gave of their time and knowledge to create it for us.
Thursday, 12 March 2020
Preface for "The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and Provocations"
I was very touched, and honoured, to be invited by Suse Anderson and Keir Winesmith last year to write a preface for their book The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and Provocations (Routledge, 2020).
Keir and Suse are two of my favourite Australians, two of my favourite Australian - American (and in Keir's case, back in Australia again) transplants, two of my favourite digital museum people, and two of my valued friends formed through years of association with the National Digital Forum. I've benefited for more than a decade now from their incredible generosity of thought, and the way they take a show-your-workings approach to going about their research and mahi, opening that up for all interested people.
The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and Provocations is made up of facilitated conversations between pairs of thinkers and (mostly museum) practitioners. Starting from the swathing changes wrought by the widespread adoption of digital technology in society and in museums, as the blurb states, the book "offers provocations and reflections about effective practice that will help prepare today’s museums for tomorrow, culminating in a set of competing possible visions for the future of the museum sector."
The book includes 12 conversations, between people including Seph Rodney & Robert J. Stein, LaToya Devezin & Barbara Makuati-Afitu, Shelley Bernstein & Seb Chan, and Tony Butler & Lori Fogarty. Throughout, Suse and Keir add their own prompts, and two pieces that frame the conversations.
I've read the whole thing, and it is illuminating, personalised, striking in its cultural differences, and powerful in its quality of thinking. I couldn't recommend it to you more.
Preface to The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and Provocations
The distinguishing characteristic of the people leading practice in the development of 'digital' in museums is, I believe, that they are given to both action and theory, with a healthy side in activism. Many other industries and occupations combine a strong theoretical aspect with hands-on practice, but I see something unique in the way people who work on the web create, theorise, and connect, perhaps because the mechanism we connect through is also the stuff we create with.
The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and Provocations is, for me, a book about thinking. It's a book that brings into conversation a group of thinkers who characteristically do their thinking in public. The body of knowledge captured in these conversations has grown largely through the mechanisms of conferences, blogs and social media; indeed, it is through these channels that Keir Winesmith and Suse Anderson first encountered many of the contributors. As Seb Chan observes in his conversation with Shelley Bernstein, when Keir asks why both have such a commitment to working "in the open":
This ethos of thinking in public is fueled by tremendous generosity, another characteristic of this community. It is also an approach that takes advantage of the democratising effects of the internet. In this new paradigm it's not the brand name of the institution you're affiliated to but the quality of your contribution that matters. As Seb also observes, this has been particularly important for those of us working in or alongside cultural institutions beyond the traditional centres of power and attention. In the first wave of museum/digital practice, it was the voices of those people working outside the dominant centres of geographical and institutional power that had new power to be heard. Today, it's voices from beyond the dominant cultures - communities that have traditionally been marginalised, silenced or spoken for by the museum - that are at the forefront of changing museum practice.
The Digital Future of Museums is also a book about museums as generators and conduits of thinking. Seph Rodney identifies in his conversation with Robert Stein that museums play an important role in "having us think about our thinking, publicly". Museums reflect and shape the perspectives of nations, societies, communities and individuals about their histories, their cultures, their politics, biases, and view of the future. By driving a museum's intellectual agenda funders, management, and staff create the stories and imagery that inform (or confirm, or challenge) how a society thinks about itself. This is why museums are not, and can never be, neutral. It is also why they are such exciting and meaningful - and occasionally hazardous - places to work.
I first encountered Seph’s writing in 2016, in a piece he wrote for Hyperallergic, based on his PhD research. In the essay, Seph traces a progression in museums from the late 19th century paradigm of the specialist collecting institution, to the post-Second World War paradigm of the educational institution, to the 21st century paradigm of the visitor-centred museum. In the contemporary context, personalisation has succeeded education. The visitor is no longer seen by the museum as an incidental beneficiary of its core focus on collecting and categorisation, no longer viewed as a passive recipient of authoritative curatorial knowledge, but invited to be an active participant, making their own meaning from the museum's offerings.
Seph attributes the change over the past 25 years to an intertwined set of economic, social, political and museological changes. The emergence of the new museology has placed the visitor at the centre of museum practice; cultural policies (largely in countries where museums are publicly funded) have pushed museums towards new success measures based around access and economic contribution; and the rise of the experience economy has led to the creation of museum experiences designed for consumption, according to the user/visitor's needs and desires. This framework provides a thought-provoking context in which to locate the 13 discussions that make up The Digital Future of Museums. The concerns of people leading digital change in our museums far exceed questions of what file format to use, or whether it's AR or VR we should bank on for visitor appeal. Within these conversations, we can see leading thinkers analysing in real time some of the greatest limitations and opportunities that museums as social structures and services are working through today.
Throughout the conversations, you'll notice contributors offering different versions of a similar refrain: digital isn't a technology, it's a way of working; digital isn't a technology, it's a language; digital isn't special, it's just what is. This refrain brings us to the heart of this book: the fruitful, fascinating, and fast-paced ways in which the development of contemporary digital technology has interfaced with contemporary museum thinking.
Like the earliest iteration of the museum, the internet was initially a research tool used by specialists and those with privileged access to (computing) power. When Tim Berners-Lee began development of the World Wide Web in 1989, his goal was to make the internet "a collaborative medium, a place where we can all meet and read and write". With the launch of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, the internet went mainstream: now, anyone with an internet connection could 'surf' this massive new global resource for information and entertainment. At this point however, publishing power was still limited: the means of creating and consuming content were separated. The web, in some ways, was in the second museum paradigm: a place where those with access to the tools of publishing fed content and knowledge to those who primarily consumed without contributing back. We can map the beginnings of digitised collections to this moment, and the new ability for all museums to think massively beyond their local remit into global reach.
It was at the turn of the 21st century, with the rise of blogging and wiki platforms and the integration of publishing tools into the medium, that Berners-Lee's vision was fulfilled: the web as a two-way system, where 'ordinary' people could contribute content as easily as they accessed it. This was the read/write web: a medium capable of being displayed (read) and also modified (write). The congruence here between the new affordances of the web and the new approaches to exhibition and experience design fascinate me; all fed by people's growing expectations that their experiences and opinions warrant recognition and sharing.
In 2005 Tim O'Reilly published 'What is Web 2.0', an analysis of design patterns and business models that he saw underlying the companies that had survived the 2001 dot-com bubble burst. The codification of Web 2.0 highlighted collaborative services, "harnessing the collective intelligence", and the power of user-generated content. This was the age of Wikipedia and Flickr; of folksonomies and tagging; of RSS and viral marketing. It's when Time magazine made its 2006 Person of the Year You, recognising the millions of individuals who were now populating the web's content, and when ideas of co-creation, co-curation and community participation went mainstream in museums.
Writing in 2017, technology commentator Alexis Madrigal observed that "Web 2.0 was not just a temporal description, but an ethos". It was a picture of the truly open web; an almost Utopian vision of humankind working together for global betterment. "But then", writes Madrigal,
Today, the ground has shifted again. As Adriel Luis observes in his conversation with Sarah Brin, over this intervening period "museum conferences everywhere have gravitated towards the theme of social change". The sector is asking itself hard questions about impact, social change and social justice. Within this questioning, there is a growing awareness that in their efforts to decolonise themselves - to cast off their colonialist and imperialist origins - museums may fall into perpetuating a form of neo-colonialism, often in the attempt to fulfil the vision of universal knowledge they were founded upon.
Sarah Kenderdine touches on the tension between the value museums place on access to heritage and knowledge and the growing understanding of the prejudice of this attitude in her conversation with Merete Sanderhoff. Talking about the creation of high-resolution digital facsimiles of heritage objects, she notes:
As we look to the future then, I recommend one particular chapter in this book to all readers. The conversation between LaToya Devezin and Barbara Makuati-Afitu shows, in applied practice, ways of working that could and should form the culture of museums of the future. LaToya, in her discussion of working with African American and other communities, describes a post-custodial model of museum and archival practice, where emphasis is placed not on the physical housing of the object, but the preservation of a community's culture and stories: of the institution being of service. Barbara, when asked what is required for institutions to respect and protect the stories and knowledge communities chose to share with them, replies, "It's someone fully understanding culturally and spiritually the sacredness of that knowledge that isn't ours, that isn't mine, and wanting to know how we can help - using different platforms - to ensure its safety." And when asked at the conclusion of the conversation what museums may look like in 20 years' time if they follow these practices, LaToya concludes:
Keir and Suse are two of my favourite Australians, two of my favourite Australian - American (and in Keir's case, back in Australia again) transplants, two of my favourite digital museum people, and two of my valued friends formed through years of association with the National Digital Forum. I've benefited for more than a decade now from their incredible generosity of thought, and the way they take a show-your-workings approach to going about their research and mahi, opening that up for all interested people.
The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and Provocations is made up of facilitated conversations between pairs of thinkers and (mostly museum) practitioners. Starting from the swathing changes wrought by the widespread adoption of digital technology in society and in museums, as the blurb states, the book "offers provocations and reflections about effective practice that will help prepare today’s museums for tomorrow, culminating in a set of competing possible visions for the future of the museum sector."
The book includes 12 conversations, between people including Seph Rodney & Robert J. Stein, LaToya Devezin & Barbara Makuati-Afitu, Shelley Bernstein & Seb Chan, and Tony Butler & Lori Fogarty. Throughout, Suse and Keir add their own prompts, and two pieces that frame the conversations.
I've read the whole thing, and it is illuminating, personalised, striking in its cultural differences, and powerful in its quality of thinking. I couldn't recommend it to you more.
Preface to The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and Provocations
The distinguishing characteristic of the people leading practice in the development of 'digital' in museums is, I believe, that they are given to both action and theory, with a healthy side in activism. Many other industries and occupations combine a strong theoretical aspect with hands-on practice, but I see something unique in the way people who work on the web create, theorise, and connect, perhaps because the mechanism we connect through is also the stuff we create with.
The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and Provocations is, for me, a book about thinking. It's a book that brings into conversation a group of thinkers who characteristically do their thinking in public. The body of knowledge captured in these conversations has grown largely through the mechanisms of conferences, blogs and social media; indeed, it is through these channels that Keir Winesmith and Suse Anderson first encountered many of the contributors. As Seb Chan observes in his conversation with Shelley Bernstein, when Keir asks why both have such a commitment to working "in the open":
For me it's about working in public. I grew up with the web, and this notion of ‘viewing source code’ has infused my philosophy around lots of things. That we all get better if we share information, and we bring the other generations along with us. And it is about transparency and openness as a differentiator, too. I found that early on at Powerhouse. It was a way of creating an international network of peers and peer institutions that we could bounce ideas off and share information with.Research, experimentation, documentation and reflection: by talking not only about what they are doing, but how and why they are doing it, and what they have learned from doing it - at an unprecedented volume, unhampered by the publishing schedules or peer review of academic journals - these thinkers have shaped the discourse around museums in a new, powerful and rapid way. Moreover, this discourse has been shaped by interactivity from the outset: blogs were made to be commented on and hyperlinked; wikis to be edited; social media posts to be shared and replied to. This is one of the reasons the interview format adopted in The Digital Future of Museums serves its contributors and its readers so well: it supports the collaborative development of ideas fostered by the best online engagements, as well as humour, respectful disagreement, and new insights.
This ethos of thinking in public is fueled by tremendous generosity, another characteristic of this community. It is also an approach that takes advantage of the democratising effects of the internet. In this new paradigm it's not the brand name of the institution you're affiliated to but the quality of your contribution that matters. As Seb also observes, this has been particularly important for those of us working in or alongside cultural institutions beyond the traditional centres of power and attention. In the first wave of museum/digital practice, it was the voices of those people working outside the dominant centres of geographical and institutional power that had new power to be heard. Today, it's voices from beyond the dominant cultures - communities that have traditionally been marginalised, silenced or spoken for by the museum - that are at the forefront of changing museum practice.
The Digital Future of Museums is also a book about museums as generators and conduits of thinking. Seph Rodney identifies in his conversation with Robert Stein that museums play an important role in "having us think about our thinking, publicly". Museums reflect and shape the perspectives of nations, societies, communities and individuals about their histories, their cultures, their politics, biases, and view of the future. By driving a museum's intellectual agenda funders, management, and staff create the stories and imagery that inform (or confirm, or challenge) how a society thinks about itself. This is why museums are not, and can never be, neutral. It is also why they are such exciting and meaningful - and occasionally hazardous - places to work.
I first encountered Seph’s writing in 2016, in a piece he wrote for Hyperallergic, based on his PhD research. In the essay, Seph traces a progression in museums from the late 19th century paradigm of the specialist collecting institution, to the post-Second World War paradigm of the educational institution, to the 21st century paradigm of the visitor-centred museum. In the contemporary context, personalisation has succeeded education. The visitor is no longer seen by the museum as an incidental beneficiary of its core focus on collecting and categorisation, no longer viewed as a passive recipient of authoritative curatorial knowledge, but invited to be an active participant, making their own meaning from the museum's offerings.
Seph attributes the change over the past 25 years to an intertwined set of economic, social, political and museological changes. The emergence of the new museology has placed the visitor at the centre of museum practice; cultural policies (largely in countries where museums are publicly funded) have pushed museums towards new success measures based around access and economic contribution; and the rise of the experience economy has led to the creation of museum experiences designed for consumption, according to the user/visitor's needs and desires. This framework provides a thought-provoking context in which to locate the 13 discussions that make up The Digital Future of Museums. The concerns of people leading digital change in our museums far exceed questions of what file format to use, or whether it's AR or VR we should bank on for visitor appeal. Within these conversations, we can see leading thinkers analysing in real time some of the greatest limitations and opportunities that museums as social structures and services are working through today.
Throughout the conversations, you'll notice contributors offering different versions of a similar refrain: digital isn't a technology, it's a way of working; digital isn't a technology, it's a language; digital isn't special, it's just what is. This refrain brings us to the heart of this book: the fruitful, fascinating, and fast-paced ways in which the development of contemporary digital technology has interfaced with contemporary museum thinking.
Like the earliest iteration of the museum, the internet was initially a research tool used by specialists and those with privileged access to (computing) power. When Tim Berners-Lee began development of the World Wide Web in 1989, his goal was to make the internet "a collaborative medium, a place where we can all meet and read and write". With the launch of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, the internet went mainstream: now, anyone with an internet connection could 'surf' this massive new global resource for information and entertainment. At this point however, publishing power was still limited: the means of creating and consuming content were separated. The web, in some ways, was in the second museum paradigm: a place where those with access to the tools of publishing fed content and knowledge to those who primarily consumed without contributing back. We can map the beginnings of digitised collections to this moment, and the new ability for all museums to think massively beyond their local remit into global reach.
It was at the turn of the 21st century, with the rise of blogging and wiki platforms and the integration of publishing tools into the medium, that Berners-Lee's vision was fulfilled: the web as a two-way system, where 'ordinary' people could contribute content as easily as they accessed it. This was the read/write web: a medium capable of being displayed (read) and also modified (write). The congruence here between the new affordances of the web and the new approaches to exhibition and experience design fascinate me; all fed by people's growing expectations that their experiences and opinions warrant recognition and sharing.
In 2005 Tim O'Reilly published 'What is Web 2.0', an analysis of design patterns and business models that he saw underlying the companies that had survived the 2001 dot-com bubble burst. The codification of Web 2.0 highlighted collaborative services, "harnessing the collective intelligence", and the power of user-generated content. This was the age of Wikipedia and Flickr; of folksonomies and tagging; of RSS and viral marketing. It's when Time magazine made its 2006 Person of the Year You, recognising the millions of individuals who were now populating the web's content, and when ideas of co-creation, co-curation and community participation went mainstream in museums.
Writing in 2017, technology commentator Alexis Madrigal observed that "Web 2.0 was not just a temporal description, but an ethos". It was a picture of the truly open web; an almost Utopian vision of humankind working together for global betterment. "But then", writes Madrigal,
in June of 2007, the iPhone came out. Thirteen months later, Apple’s App Store debuted. Suddenly, the most expedient and enjoyable way to do something was often tapping an individual icon on a screen. As smartphones took off, the amount of time that people spent on the truly open web began to dwindle. ... The great cathedrals of that time, nearly impossible projects like Wikipedia that worked and worked well, have all stagnated.Madrigal's analysis matches with a feeling I developed in 2015, as I toured around museums in seven American states studying digitally-enhanced visitor experiences. Overall, as I visited the museums leading in this space, I observed a move away from projects focused on global audiences, and a move towards personalised experiences delivered via smartphones and customised devices available onsite at the museum. While these new experiences were often rich, subtle and playful – and designed to collect information that helped institution learn more about the behaviour and motivations of physical visitors – this shift in focus from global to local seemed to be paired with a reduction in sector-wide, collaborative endeavours. I asked myself at the time if this was a natural consequence of digital leaders’ roving curiosity: that the opportunities of collaborative platforms, APIs, metadata sharing and so on had been thoroughly explored, and new ground opened up for exploration. I also quietly questioned whether museum leadership and external funders had abandoned the altruism encouraged by the open web environment, and were now more inclined to support projects where the benefits could be firmly located within the museum’s walls.
Today, the ground has shifted again. As Adriel Luis observes in his conversation with Sarah Brin, over this intervening period "museum conferences everywhere have gravitated towards the theme of social change". The sector is asking itself hard questions about impact, social change and social justice. Within this questioning, there is a growing awareness that in their efforts to decolonise themselves - to cast off their colonialist and imperialist origins - museums may fall into perpetuating a form of neo-colonialism, often in the attempt to fulfil the vision of universal knowledge they were founded upon.
Sarah Kenderdine touches on the tension between the value museums place on access to heritage and knowledge and the growing understanding of the prejudice of this attitude in her conversation with Merete Sanderhoff. Talking about the creation of high-resolution digital facsimiles of heritage objects, she notes:
Critics look at this as a kind of massive cultural appropriation or neo-colonialism that the digital has unleashed in the documentation of other cultures, under a banner of heritage at risk. It's an extraordinary moment. It's not like iconoclasm is new, but now it's in the public domain. We are able to create phenomenal amounts of digital data, but it does come with this overtone of neo-colonialism.The same point is raised in a response signed by over 100 scholars and practitioners in intellectual property law and material and digital cultural heritage to the 2018 Sarr-Savoy Report, which recommended to the French government the restitution of African material culture from French museums to colonised countries. The response challenges the report's recommendation that all items identified for return should be systematically digitised and made available online, arguing that "the report’s recommendations, if followed, risk placing the French government in a position of returning Africa’s Material Cultural Heritage while retaining control over the generation, presentation, and stewardship of Africa’s digital cultural heritage for decades to come."
As we look to the future then, I recommend one particular chapter in this book to all readers. The conversation between LaToya Devezin and Barbara Makuati-Afitu shows, in applied practice, ways of working that could and should form the culture of museums of the future. LaToya, in her discussion of working with African American and other communities, describes a post-custodial model of museum and archival practice, where emphasis is placed not on the physical housing of the object, but the preservation of a community's culture and stories: of the institution being of service. Barbara, when asked what is required for institutions to respect and protect the stories and knowledge communities chose to share with them, replies, "It's someone fully understanding culturally and spiritually the sacredness of that knowledge that isn't ours, that isn't mine, and wanting to know how we can help - using different platforms - to ensure its safety." And when asked at the conclusion of the conversation what museums may look like in 20 years' time if they follow these practices, LaToya concludes:
We're going to have a more multidimensional viewpoint of history, and I think we can really affect social change. We'll have more diversity within our staffs, and a more enriching experience as a whole. I feel like our space will be more transformative over time, and that we can grow with each other, and maybe it will give us the space to have some of those difficult conversations to be able to foster change. If we all could participate in conversations like the conversation that we're having now, I can see it being such a beautiful and wonderful process.The beauty of this book is being invited into these conversations in this moment. On behalf of all its readers in the future, I give my thanks to the generosity of all those who gave of their time and knowledge to create it for us.
Saturday, 11 January 2020
Reading list, 11 January 2020
Germany's parliament has approved €41 million (pending regional co-funding) to establish a new institution in Dusseldorf to preserve, archive and publicise the nation's photographic cultural heritage
ArtNews's Biggest Art World Flops of the 2010s
Hyperallergic's 2019 Most Powerless People in the Artworld list
Michael Edson's Pantheon of Reads 2019
Cultural Competitors: What Are Likely Visitors Interested In Doing Instead? American data on likely visitors to cultural institutions shows a sharp increase in the desire to stay home on weeknights and weekends
Amanda Hess for the New York Times on the mall-as-experience: Welcome to the Era of the Post-Shopping Mall, and accompanying commentary and context from the Gray Market Weekly
Two online readers of essays related to Mana Wahine, featuring writers such as Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Leonie Pihama and texts written between 1987 and 2019. Developed with Te Kotahi Research Institute and supported by Ngā Pae o Te Māramatanga
A book recommendation - for fans of beautiful world building, Frances Hardinge knocked it out of the park again with Deeplight (and also interesting for her collaboration with the Young People's Advisory Board of the National Deaf Children's Society to create the 'sea-kissed' characters and culture)
North & South does a 30-year follow-up of a feature written in 1989 by Rosemary McLeod, of 31 women 'shaping our lives and the country's future', including Helen Clark, Suzanne Snively, Sian Elias and Hekia Parata.
ArtNews's Biggest Art World Flops of the 2010s
Hyperallergic's 2019 Most Powerless People in the Artworld list
Michael Edson's Pantheon of Reads 2019
Cultural Competitors: What Are Likely Visitors Interested In Doing Instead? American data on likely visitors to cultural institutions shows a sharp increase in the desire to stay home on weeknights and weekends
Amanda Hess for the New York Times on the mall-as-experience: Welcome to the Era of the Post-Shopping Mall, and accompanying commentary and context from the Gray Market Weekly
Two online readers of essays related to Mana Wahine, featuring writers such as Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Leonie Pihama and texts written between 1987 and 2019. Developed with Te Kotahi Research Institute and supported by Ngā Pae o Te Māramatanga
A book recommendation - for fans of beautiful world building, Frances Hardinge knocked it out of the park again with Deeplight (and also interesting for her collaboration with the Young People's Advisory Board of the National Deaf Children's Society to create the 'sea-kissed' characters and culture)
North & South does a 30-year follow-up of a feature written in 1989 by Rosemary McLeod, of 31 women 'shaping our lives and the country's future', including Helen Clark, Suzanne Snively, Sian Elias and Hekia Parata.
Saturday, 28 December 2019
Reading list, 28 December 2019
The 11 Biggest Controversies That Rocked the Art World in 2019 and The Art Controversies That Defined the 2010s - from Artnet, so the American view. The increased scrutiny and publicity around the ethics of patronage, sponsorship and governance was my #1 trend for the artworld in 2019.
And The Biggest Cultural Moments of 2019 from Art Agency Partners
50 years of the museum in the community - a write-up from a symposium held at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum and jointly hosted by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (more a list of the talks held than insights generated but still handy)
Open storage is back - profiling the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum's new building project in Rotterdam
"An exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art shows the limits of “soft power” at a time when museums are being transformed by hard activism" - Soft Power at MOMA
Kent Monkman at the Met (NYT)
A group of American historians challenged the NYT's 1619 project: The Atlantic covers the discussion/dispute, and the NYT responds to the criticisms. Interesting for when academic imperatives and perspectives meet journalistic and activist ones.
The five stages of an art world scandal - how the banana made it
Things I missed earlier this year: a two-part interview with Glenn Lowry on the revamped MOMA, succession planning & more (part one, part two)
And The Biggest Cultural Moments of 2019 from Art Agency Partners
50 years of the museum in the community - a write-up from a symposium held at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum and jointly hosted by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (more a list of the talks held than insights generated but still handy)
Open storage is back - profiling the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum's new building project in Rotterdam
"An exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art shows the limits of “soft power” at a time when museums are being transformed by hard activism" - Soft Power at MOMA
Kent Monkman at the Met (NYT)
A group of American historians challenged the NYT's 1619 project: The Atlantic covers the discussion/dispute, and the NYT responds to the criticisms. Interesting for when academic imperatives and perspectives meet journalistic and activist ones.
The five stages of an art world scandal - how the banana made it
Things I missed earlier this year: a two-part interview with Glenn Lowry on the revamped MOMA, succession planning & more (part one, part two)
Saturday, 21 December 2019
Reading list, 21 December 2019
In the Guardian - Australia governments urged to stamp out enslavement and exploitation of Aboriginal artists
Opinion piece in the NYT - How the Superrich Took Over the Museum World
On Hyperallergic - Organizations Outside the Art World Are Better at Reaching Underserved Populations
On theArtnet podcast - Is the Art World Causing a Climate Catastrophe? (it's the art fairs ...)
Looking back over the Pantograph Punch's year, I re-read an important piece: Will Hansen's Honour Thy Queer Ancestors: On Queer Progress
France Says It Will Return 26 Artifacts to Benin By 2021, in Major Move on Repatriation
Opinion piece in the NYT - How the Superrich Took Over the Museum World
On Hyperallergic - Organizations Outside the Art World Are Better at Reaching Underserved Populations
On theArtnet podcast - Is the Art World Causing a Climate Catastrophe? (it's the art fairs ...)
Looking back over the Pantograph Punch's year, I re-read an important piece: Will Hansen's Honour Thy Queer Ancestors: On Queer Progress
France Says It Will Return 26 Artifacts to Benin By 2021, in Major Move on Repatriation
Sunday, 15 December 2019
Reading list, 15 December 2019
The Art World Really Is Unfair: 9 reasons why, from Artnet
Seema Rao reflects on museum work in the 2010s
The V&A have released their updated exhibition interpretation guidelines (the post has a link to download, plus 10 top recommendations)
The Guardian has launched a public appeal to track down Benin bronzes in smaller museums
Mark Amery and Megan Dunn run down 10 top moments from the past decade of New Zealand art for The Spinoff
Also in The Spinoff, Jim Barr and Mary Barr report on Ruth Buchanan's full-gallery 50th anniversary collection hang for the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.
Jesse Green for the New York Times: How Today’s Queer Artists Are Revising History
Roberta Smith for the New York Times: A Sea Change in the Art World, Made by Black Creators
Maui Solomon for E-Tangata: Moriori: Still setting the record straight
The State of Museum Digital Practice in 2019: A collection of graduate essays and responses
Seema Rao reflects on museum work in the 2010s
The V&A have released their updated exhibition interpretation guidelines (the post has a link to download, plus 10 top recommendations)
The Guardian has launched a public appeal to track down Benin bronzes in smaller museums
Mark Amery and Megan Dunn run down 10 top moments from the past decade of New Zealand art for The Spinoff
Also in The Spinoff, Jim Barr and Mary Barr report on Ruth Buchanan's full-gallery 50th anniversary collection hang for the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.
Jesse Green for the New York Times: How Today’s Queer Artists Are Revising History
Roberta Smith for the New York Times: A Sea Change in the Art World, Made by Black Creators
Maui Solomon for E-Tangata: Moriori: Still setting the record straight
The State of Museum Digital Practice in 2019: A collection of graduate essays and responses
Saturday, 23 November 2019
Reading list, 23 November 2019
The Open Society Foundations, funded by George Soros, has launched a 4 year, US$15M fund to aid restitution of taonga to Africa:
At 88, Agnes Denes Finally Gets the Retrospective She Deserves
Psychology researcher Muireann Irish was one of the speakers I heard at the Big Anxiety conference a few weeks ago: The self in dementia is not lost, and can be reached with care
The Open Society’s initiative will support African lawyers, scholars, archivists, and grassroots organizations campaigning for the return of artifacts taken during the colonial era. It will also fund meetings between cultural leaders and work to promote partnerships between museums, governments, and other organizations.A report from the Happy Museum with case studies on how six Welsh museums have responded to the Welsh Wellbeing of Future Generations Act
At 88, Agnes Denes Finally Gets the Retrospective She Deserves
Psychology researcher Muireann Irish was one of the speakers I heard at the Big Anxiety conference a few weeks ago: The self in dementia is not lost, and can be reached with care
The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up - a system that looks like chaos to you might simply be complicated.
A number of New Zealand and Pacific voices in this NYT article: Is It Time Gauguin Got Canceled?
On the Dora Maar survey exhibition at Tate Modern: Dora Maar: how Picasso's weeping woman had the last laugh (with the Guardian's reliably bad headline-writing for these kinds of revisionist stories)
A one year review for Max Hollein: At the Entrenched Met Museum, the New Director Shakes Things Up
On Dread Scott's slave rebellion reenactment in Louisiana: With a Slave Rebellion Re-enactment, an Artist Revives Forgotten History
A couple of reports from this month's MCN conference in San Diego:
- Because they are hard… Reflections on #MCN2019 by Suse Anderson
- Sustaining and Maintenance: Reflections on MCN2019 by Rachel Ropeik
Saturday, 9 November 2019
Reading list, 9 November 2019
Zadie Paul on painter Celia Paul's memoir: The Muse at Her Easel and a response as well from Rachel Cusk in the New York Times: Can a Woman Who Is an Artist Ever Just Be an Artist?
I've just started digging into RNZ's Now We Are Five (Million) on Aotearoa's population growth
Ditto, I need to set some time aside to dig into the NZ Herald's series Land of the Long White Cloud: Pākehā New Zealanders reflect on their colonial past and future.
Amy Qin for the New York Times: ‘Museum Diplomacy’ as New Pompidou Center Opens in Shanghai
I've just started digging into RNZ's Now We Are Five (Million) on Aotearoa's population growth
Ditto, I need to set some time aside to dig into the NZ Herald's series Land of the Long White Cloud: Pākehā New Zealanders reflect on their colonial past and future.
Amy Qin for the New York Times: ‘Museum Diplomacy’ as New Pompidou Center Opens in Shanghai
Saturday, 2 November 2019
Reading list, 2 November 2019
"So why not monetize the intangibles?" Punting the idea of paying admission for popular book stores.
The latest Gray Market: Why Ethical Vetting of Collectors Won't Reshape the Art Market, responding to Brian Boucher's In the Post-Warren Kanders Era, Artists and Dealers Wonder: Should Collectors Be Vetted? for Artnet
Age and readiness are not the same thing: Museum Directors Under 40: A Brief History of 20 Young Leaders Who Helped Shape Their Institutions (American context)
Ngarino Ellis, New Zealand's only Māori art history lecturer, interviewed on RNZ
Teenagers, boomers, and intergenerational critique via merchandise #okboomer
Australian arts activists The Countess have released their latest report on gender representation in the visual arts
My October Nine to Noon appearance (the Kaldor Public Art Projects exhibition at AGNSW; Renaissance Bologna's unusual support of women artists and The Countess report's data on the not-unusual gender imbalances in Australia's visual arts; the Adam Art Gallery's forthcoming 20th anniversary shows)
Paula Bray on the process of using BookSprints to collaboratively write a book on setting up, running, and shutting down labs in cultural institutions, all in 5 days.
Have been a bit ho-hum on the MOMA opinion pieces, but will always make time for Maura Reilly - MoMA’s Revisionism Is Piecemeal and Problem-Filled: Feminist Art Historian Maura Reilly on the Museum’s Rehang
The latest Gray Market: Why Ethical Vetting of Collectors Won't Reshape the Art Market, responding to Brian Boucher's In the Post-Warren Kanders Era, Artists and Dealers Wonder: Should Collectors Be Vetted? for Artnet
Age and readiness are not the same thing: Museum Directors Under 40: A Brief History of 20 Young Leaders Who Helped Shape Their Institutions (American context)
Ngarino Ellis, New Zealand's only Māori art history lecturer, interviewed on RNZ
Teenagers, boomers, and intergenerational critique via merchandise #okboomer
Australian arts activists The Countess have released their latest report on gender representation in the visual arts
My October Nine to Noon appearance (the Kaldor Public Art Projects exhibition at AGNSW; Renaissance Bologna's unusual support of women artists and The Countess report's data on the not-unusual gender imbalances in Australia's visual arts; the Adam Art Gallery's forthcoming 20th anniversary shows)
Paula Bray on the process of using BookSprints to collaboratively write a book on setting up, running, and shutting down labs in cultural institutions, all in 5 days.
Have been a bit ho-hum on the MOMA opinion pieces, but will always make time for Maura Reilly - MoMA’s Revisionism Is Piecemeal and Problem-Filled: Feminist Art Historian Maura Reilly on the Museum’s Rehang
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