Saturday 23 January 2016

Reading list, 23 January 2016

This month, Wikipedia turned 15. Pew looks at some key stats in the current site/s and major events in its history.

Also interesting from Pew: an analysis of print and online newspaper readers in three American cities shows print-only readership is still strong, and that print-only consumption is more strongly linked to consumption of local television news.

On Quartz - an exhaustive, fascinating, but I believe flawed in many ways piece titled Museums are keeping a ton of the world’s most famous art locked away in storage. I'd like to have the opportunity to really thrash this topic out (rather than pick it apart in a one-sided blog post) as I have *many* points, including about the artists they used in their data collection (predominantly white, male, and Western); the balance between collection shows and temporary exhibitions, and the connection to audience demand; and the alternatives to 'locking the art up in the vaults' (such as building more exhibition space, or selling the works, at which point they would .... enter private collections belonging to wealthy individuals and organisations, and risk truly disappearing from public access?).

In 1929 the Field Museum commissioned a series of portrait busts and full-figure sculptures to document the 'races of mankind'. Kept largely in storage since the end of the 1960s, the museum has just placed 50 of the sculptures produced by Malvina Hoffman back on display in an exhibition that squarely faces the difficult history of these objects.

A good complement to the above piece: Tusk has been publishing some strong pieces, but this essay by Matariki Williams on the Jono Rotman show at City Gallery last year is a stand-out.

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