Saturday 26 March 2016

Reading list for 26 March 2016

If you read one thing this weekend, make it Tara Robertson's 'Digitization: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should', on putting copies On Our Backs, a lesbian porn magazine published between 1984 and 2000, online. A thoughtful and well-researched examination of the consideration that should be undertaken when putting material made in non-internet eras or cultures online.

An even-handed review in Nature by David Hurst Thomas, archaeologist and anthropology curator at the American Museum of Natural History, of Tiffany Jenkins' Keeping Their Marbles on museum repatriation and Samuel Redman's Bone Rooms, on the collecting and display of human remains.

A throwback, but new to me: David Osa Amadasun on his outreach work, '“Black people don’t go to galleries” – The reproduction of taste and cultural value'.

Simon Denny features in a lengthy article in the Guardian by Hannah Ellis-Petersen, about what the Generation Y avant garde might look like.
Though celebratory in spirit, ‘ “Revolution” raises difficult questions, as “Wack!” did, one being whether all-women shows, unless driven by strategic necessity or shaped around an incisive theme, are a healthy idea. Do such roundups — several are scheduled at American museums in the year ahead — help correct the gender inequity of the art world, which is very real (look at auction figures and exhibition schedules), or perpetuate it? Do they give women a visibility that will lead to their full integration into the larger art system? Or do they position them forever as outsiders, separate but, in terms of rewards, unequal?
'Are all-women shows good or bad for art?' - Holland Cotter in the New York Times on Hauser Wirth & Schimmel's opening exhibition, Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947-2016.

NPR will not explicitly promote its own podcasts, or their NPR One podcast player, in broadcasts in deference to local stations with whom it has a distribution agreement. Reminds me of the way newspapers will still cite a website or webpage in a piece of coverage online, but not hyperlink it.

My own long-weekend reading; the first Culture white paper from the British government since 1965. (link is a PDF).

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