Reading list, 22 April 2017

Anne Helen Petersen on The Radical Feminist Aesthetic Of "The Handmaid’s Tale" (the tv series); follow it up with the New Yorker's profile of Margaret Atwood by Rebecca Mead.

This show sounds amazing: Adrian Searle reviews Queer British Art 1861-1967 for the Guardian.

A real long read: Helen Rosner argues The Real Legacy of ‘Lucky Peach’ Is How It Looked on Eater.

Holland Cotter on MOMA's Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction for the New York Times:

These shows are invariably moving, surprising and adventurous. The present one certainly is. But they have too easily become a new normal, an acceptable way to show women but keep them segregated from the permanent-collection galleries. In other words, they are a way to keep MoMA’s old and false, but coherent and therefore salable, story of Modernism intact.

Yet another dissection of Thomas Campbell's ejection from The Met - scroll down, it turns out the failing gift store was at the bottom of it.

A truly terrific interview with Kara Walker, by Doreen St. Félix for Vulture.

Philip Kennicott's review of visiting the Kusama exhibition at the Hirschhorn like a normal pleb is less whiny and more thought-provoking than the headline would suggest: I went to Kusama and all I got was this lousy selfie.

The Los Angeles Times is running a series on what L.A. would look like without government arts funding.

Reading list, 15 April 2017

Emma Ng has been commissioned by Design Assembly to write four essays over the time between the American and New Zealand elections - she kicks off with 'What does a fact look like?'.

Calvin Tompkins was clearly writing this New Yorker profile on painter Dana Schutz well before the controversy erupted over her work Open Casket (an interpretation of the famous photo of murdered African American teenager Emmett Till in his coffin) at the Whitney Biennial. His piece helpfully provides more context on the artist and her career up to this point - as well as some insight into her own feelings on the outcry.

New(isH) Auckland free magazine Paperboy is commissioning some great arts writing. Here's Anthony Byrt's piece from their recent issue focused on homelessness, 'How artist Kalisolaite ‘Uhila made a statement by vanishing into the streets'.

Queueing this up for the weekend - Artsy's latest podcast, on the history of the white cube gallery.

This would be comedic, if it weren't so demoralising: 'Jeff Koons’s New Line'.

A fascinating read from Rachel Cooke for the Guardian: 'Eric Gill: can we separate the artist from the abuser?'

Tim Murphy interviews e-Tangata co-founders and editors Tapu Misa and Gary Wilson as BWB Texts publishes a best-of selection of essays from the site.

Reading list, 8 April 2017

The British Museums Association annual survey reveals deep cuts to public funding, accompanied both by closures and increased revenue and philanthropy generation.

Auckland Council will commission an independent review of major cultural institutions and facilities, to address a set of concerns about influence over how Council-provided funding is invested and strategic alignment of the region's cultural asset. The link includes Tim Walker's 2015 report on 'Investing in Auckland cultural infrastructure'.

Gina Fairley outlines the debate over moving the Powerhouse Museum (MAAS) to Parramatta.

Busted by data: Colleen Dilenschneider asks whether mobile apps are worthwhile for cultural institutions (hint: she says no).

Tonya Nelson writes a short but incisive piece on succession planning in museums, based on the current Met melt-down.

I'm fascinated by Damien Hirst's comeback narrative & project.

The University of South Australia plans to open a 'museum of ideas'.

One of my favourite current writers, Kyle Chayka, contributes to The Paris Review's series on artworks that influenced people by talking about invigilating an Anselm Kiefer.

Kris Sowersby of Klim Type Foundry on the new typeface he has designed for Trade Me.

Reading List, 1 April 2017

Hugo Robinson interviews Lana Lopesi on writing art criticism.

Zita Joyce writes on 'The Brooding Elitist Relationship-Wrecker: Tropes of Art and Artists on Narrative Television' for Pantograph Punch.

Hilarie M. Sheets for the NYT - 'Gender Gap Persists at Largest Museums' and the full report from the Association of Art Museum Directors.

ArtNews pulls together a variety of opinion pieces on the controversial inclusion of Dana Schutz's Open Casket, a painting based on photographs of murdered African-American teenager  Emmett Till. Many of the pieces reference Hannah Black's open letter, which has become the wellspring of many published responses. Roberta Smith's article for the NYT references similar criticisms of Kara Walker's early work in the 1990s, a moment I wasn't aware of. Missing from the round up is Antwaun Sargent's editorial for Artsy, Unpacking the Firestorm around the Whitney Biennial’s “Black Death Spectacle”.

Reading list, 25 March 2017

The NYT design pages are often preposterous, but in such a soothing way. If you need a warm-bath article this week, try 'What Happened to Traditional Floral Bouquets?'.

Large amounts of the blame being apportioned around Thomas Campbell's resignation from the Met are tagged to his digital efforts - which were seen by those inside the digital world of museums are important and instructive. Here's William D. Cohan for Vanity Fair on 'how a former wunderkind—and his mission to modernize—became a toxic mix for one of the world’s most powerful cultural institutions'.

As we move further away from shared experience of the Second World War, the director of the Anne Frank House explains that 'our visitors don’t always have sufficient prior knowledge of the Second World War to really grasp the meaning of Anne Frank and the people in hiding here ... We want to make sure that Anne Frank isn’t just an icon, but a portal into history.'

Reading list, 18 March 2017

Indian author and MP Shashi Tharoor on the need for a museum communicating British colonisation of India.

US technology writer Farhad Manjoo on the cultural supremacy of the camera (and Snapchat).

Margaret Atwood's introduction for a new edition of The Handmaid's Tale.

Teju Cole's latest essay 'A Photograph Never Stands Alone'. Also, he's coming to Auckland Writers Festival.

Kyle Chayka for Racked on why gray clothes feel appropriate now.

The full New York Times special museums section.

Ugh. There's loads in Daniel Grant's Observer piece 'The Admission Fees Are Too Damn High' that I disagree with (like the tone of "art museums around the country are struggling mightily to make themselves appealing to millennials and to what we now call “diverse” audiences by creating their own apps, as well as by acquiring and exhibiting contemporary art, as well as art by women, latinos, Africans, Asians and whomever else", let alone "Pleasure and prestige for museum curators and directors is acquiring more works for their permanent collections, not in seeing more and different people come through the doors.") But the central thesis - that American museums could divert some of their major acquisition funds into defraying admission charges - is interesting. His argument that America's entrance charges are the only thing keeping wider audiences away however is disputed by the data.

Reading list, 11 March 2017

Showing how Michael Parekowhai's The Lighthouse will become an icon of Auckland: Simon Wilson's first column for the new Auckland focus of The Spinoff uses the public art work to outline its kaupapa.

Science historian and writer Rebecca Priestley shares a reading list for her MA in creative non-fiction.

In the States, 'downsizing boomers' start donating their artworks (no mention of the tax incentives).

There is a mild irony to this article about "the greatest single loss of cultural artefacts from Britain", given the general British museum stance on repatriation.

'Can I have some more?' - Shelley Bernstein on the Barnes Foundation's latest lessons from visitor-testing their new interpretation for their galleries via smart watches.

Colleen Dilenschneider on the reputational boost to MOMA since they rehung their galleries to focus on artists from the Trump administration's travel ban countries.

Josh Niland for Hyperallergic on the Max Beckmann painting that changed American art museum collection policies in the 1970s (and still affects today's collection management).

Reading list, 4 March 2017

File under here-we-go-again: Dorothy Howard's 'The Social-Mediafication of Museums' for Canadian Art.

Sheila Regan, 'In Mainstream Museums, Confronting Colonialism While Curating Native American Art', for Hyperallergic.

Looking outside my own sector - Ballet Austin conducts research & audience experiments into understanding how people might move from being attendees at 'traditional' performances to 'contemporary' performances. It's all about removing the gulf of the unknown.

Gearing up: Thomas P. Campbell's 'The Folly of Abolishing the N.E.A.' for the New York Times. Campbell has of course since announced his resignation as director of the Met.

Ross King for Aeon on how Monet & the Impressionists were introduced first to American collectors, and via collectors to the museums: 'How wealthy Americans grew to appreciate the French Impressionist painter – as an artist but also as a financial asset'.

'Losing Streak' by Kathryn Schulz  for the New Yorker - an essay that goes from humour to heartache in one elegant spiral.

Why do a blockbuster for free? Mark Garrison's 'Yayoi Kusama exhibit is an economic puzzle for museum' for Market Place.

On widowhood

After the baby is born, you use days to tell other people your baby’s age, then you say the weeks, then the months, and then your baby has accumulated a whole year, and this becomes the most useful unit for measuring a human’s existence.

As a childless person, I don't go in much for the genre of parental writing. But a few weeks ago I was deeply affected by a piece Thomasin Sleigh wrote for The Spinoff, about how the experience of becoming a parent alters your relationship to time.

At the same time that many of my peers were becoming mothers, I became a widow. My husband killed himself. It wasn't a surprise, but it was a shock: perhaps childbirth, and then motherhood, is like that? A nearly indescribable event, and then a permanently altered state.

After reading Thomasin's essay several times, I wrote to her:

I've often thought that death is my closest connection to motherhood. Like giving birth, being a widow is a new category of being that descends you between one moment and the next. You count the passage of time in days, then weeks, then months, then years and parts thereof. All other dates take their position in the calendar from that date. Plus, you're sleep deprived, to the point where the walls start to shimmer, but that's all part of your elevation out of normal day life. 

It's a transcendent experience that is both utterly unique and also shared by almost everyone.

The word didn't come to me straight away. It wasn't until the following day that I understood I was a widow. The realisation was a door swinging shut on me: it came to me mid-step, mid-conversation, and it arrested me. I had no say in it, yet there I was: trapped, branded, cloaked by a social construction that couldn't possibly apply to me, but irrevocably did.

I tried to joke, of course, and the title Widow Johnston did have a certain ring to it, especially at my age. I turned 33 the day after my husband's funeral: my age made the state incongruous. Widows didn't look like me - particularly me in the weeks and months after the funeral, suddenly slimmed down by the adrenaline and sleeplessness, charged with energy. 'Widow Johnston' was a joke, an effort to normalise my new life, to have a code word that let us say 'This situation is ridiculous'. It hurt though. That's the point of black humour. It lets you let the pain in.

I embarked on a new role. One part of it was what I called 'grief administration': on top of closing bank accounts and phone accounts and updating insurance details and electricity bills and collecting his things from his workplace, my husband died intestate, without a will. I do not recommend this; it's a world of forms and lawyer's bills, of walking around with a death certificate in your handbag.

The other part was accepting other people's emotion. To begin with, this was a privilege: in the end it was exhausting. Sometimes people's interest was truly caring, and sometimes it was gossip-grubbing: sometimes it was just surreal. I had an inner circle whose sympathy and love I will be forever grateful for: I also have a little clutch of stories about the outrageous things people said to me, things that still make make me shake my head in wonder.

The same year that my husband died, Rebecca Lindenberg published her first book, Love, an Index, a collection of poems about the death of her own partner. In 'Losing Language: A Phrasebook' she articulates beautifully what I was groping towards:

He'll always be with you You don't have to try so hard

You're so brave I wonder what it's like when you're alone

You're so strong I can see you've showered

You've handled it with such grace You've done nothing that can't be repaired

Let me know if you need anything I won't come round again

It was hard not to get caught up in it. Within the arts community my husband was well known, and his sudden death attracted attention: attracted attention to me. I received so much praise for being young, for being strong, for coping so well. Lindenberg knew this too: both she and her partner were writers, and he died in a mysterious manner. "knows she's famous / in a tiny, tragic way. / She's not / daft, / after all" she writes in 'The Girl With The Ink-Stained Teeth'. There's a glamour to early widowhood: I can't deny it.

At times, high on emotion and attention and the supercharged nature of that first year, I thought about writing a book, or a set of essays, or even (you can see how swept up I was) giving a TED talk. To find an outlet for all the urgency, the words, the experiences, all the insights I'd been having and having shared with me.

And then I got past it. With time, widow stopped defining me. I met new people, people who knew nothing about my past, who took me at face value. And other people moved on - faster than you'd think they would. The first era of my widowhood ended one evening at a gallery opening. An artist - a woman with a very beautiful, very sad face - came towards me looking mournful. Before she spoke, I said to her "Don't. Please don't. I can't talk about it any more." And she looked at me, puzzled - talk about what? I had read her beautiful, sorrowful face as sadness for me: it was salutary to realise that actually, she just has resting sad face. It was time to stop thinking that people were thinking about me more than they were. Inflated by circumstance, I had to come back to normal size.

Still, I often wonder if I ever get to stop being a widow. Does it wear off? With each year of a new relationship do I chip away at my widowness, until eventually it is erased? Is there a statute of limitations: will I get a letter one day from Births, Deaths and Marriages, returning me to my pre-wedded state? Or is the only way to stop being a widow to start being a wife again?

There are so many differences between motherhood and widowhood; the two should probably not ever be conflated. Perhaps the clearest difference (putting aside that one starts with the beginning of a life, and the other with the ending) is that widowhood, or at least my experience of it, does recede. This Easter I will mark my fifth anniversary of becoming a widow. Where once widowhood felt like a carapace that encased me - as obvious as those steel structures that shore up earthquake-prone buildings - today the exoskeleton has sunk inside me, sits somewhere alongside my ribs and hipbones, invisible but defining my shape in the world.

On the outside, you can't tell a widow from any other woman. But last year, when I was asked to describe the most important influence on my character, it was this that I picked. Not my husband's death, so much, but the way I had to rebuild my identity after it, to take myself back. The widow is invisible from the outside, but she's still there inside me.

Reading list, 18 February 2017

A terrific profile for Metro on festival director Carla van Zon, by Bianca Zander.

Alexandra Lange reviews the new Netflix series 'Abstract: The Art of Design' for Curbed.

Jenny Uglow on painter Paul Nash for the LRB.

Reading list, 11 February 2017

MOMA protests Trump's immigration executive order by replacing works throughout its 5th floor collection galleries with works by artists from the seven banned countries. A pointed, powerful and on-mission gesture.

Pippin Barr on the difficulty of displaying water in the (video game) gallery.

Mary Pelletier for Hyperallergic on the gypsum-window workshop at Jerusalem's al-Aqsa Mosque.

Alexandra Lange for Curbed: "The forgotten history of Japanese-American designers’ World War II internment".

Robin Pobegrin for the NYT: "Is the Met Museum ‘a Great Institution in Decline’?"

Anthony Byrt for Paperboy on Michael Parekowhai's new Auckland public sculpture, The Lighthouse.

Colleen Dilenschneider on a drop in the US "High-Propensity Visitor Confidence Index" (the expressed interest from current non-visitors to visit a cultural institution) since the US election. This sounds dry, but it's actually quite fascinating.

Reading list, 4 Feb 2017

Seb Chan's annual end of year wrap

An in-depth article on free museum admission in the Atlanta context

With rumoured cuts to the NEA and America, Art News goes into its archives to find examples of tension between political decision-makers and the arts funding organisation.

Fascinating longer read: Patrick Sisson's 'How Your Mall Sausage Gets Made in Columbus, Ohio'.

Devin Leonard in Bloomberg Business Week: 'George Lucas Can’t Give His $1.5 Billion Museum Away'.

The latest from Good, Form & Spectacle - a new tool to explore MOMA's exhibitions data.

By Graham Bowley, for the New York Times: What if Trump Really Does End Money for the Arts?