Tuesday links

Visions of Virtual Culture, on FLYP:

John Temple, the editor of the Rocky Mountain News, who recently presided over the end of his print edition, speaks with the voice of grim, very personal experience, but his message is neither defeatist nor gloomy, despite all he has just been through.

One astute reader of Temple’s comments wrote: “You could take most of John’s comments, substitute the word ‘museum’ for ‘newspaper’ and the word ‘curator’ for ‘journalist’ and it would be equally true. How can museums and traditional print media learn together how to navigate a future in which services are divorced from traditional sources of income, and users expect to share authority and content development?”

Hit the link above to hear David A. Ross moderate a discussion on the future of museums with Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem; Arnold Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum, and Claudia Gould, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.

Speaking of David A. Ross, who bills self as a recovering museum director: His most recent piece on FLYP, Bearing Witness, is extraordinary.

On Art Fag City: Paddy Johnson tosses off art criticism as if it came to her while she was waiting for the bus. That casual stance is an illusion. She packs more content into a few sentences than most critics achieve from going on and on. Here she is on John Houck:

Houck’s photographic series To The Things captures the physical properties of the spiritual and logical, as well as many of their mechanical elements. Light may resemble higher reasoning in one photograph, and in another it acts as one of many products used to manufacture such an effect.

From Translinguistic Other, The Campfire in the Closet: Yes, more in Seattle about Zack Bent and the Boy Scouts, homophobia and art. I semi-regret my part in it (discussed in this essay) and would have improved it had I the chance to do it over, but, I gotta be me now that I don’t have any PI editors to prevent it.

From Best Of, Joey Veltkamp tours the MFA show at the University of Washington. His affable approach to the new strikes the right note.

From Looking Around: Richard Lacayo discusses the art being purchased for the Obama White House.The new team appears to be concentrating on artists of color and women who are senior (or dead) and comparatively under the radar, instead of the usual blue chip.

As for the public areas, the president and his family can make
proposals for what to show there, but those have to be approved by the
White House curator and something called the Committee for the
Preservation of the White House, which sounds like it was formed to
protect the place from Damien Hirst’s shark.

Nobody asked, but my way under the radar recommendations include Oliver Lee Jackson, Raymond Saunders, Weldon Butler, Marita Dingus, Preston Singletary, Joan Snyder and Elizabeth Sandvig. Using the new guidelines and removing the age limitation if there is an age limitation, the White House could be filled with wonders.