Sunday links

10th April 2016

Links to interesting stuff from the past week.

• How offshore firm helped billionaire change the art world for ever: the first of two stories about what the Panama Papers reveal about the high end of the art market, this from the Guardian team…

• The art of secrecy: … and this from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists – the articles are complementary, and compelling for anyone interested in auctions, galleries and collectors.

• At the Royal Academy: Charles Hope is very good for the London Review of Books on attribution, connoisseurship and the Royal Academy’s current Giorgione exhibition.

• Slow criticism – art in the age of post-judgement: this Anya Ventura post at Temporary is from a couple of months back, but it’s terrific on the necessity of attention (and critics):

What the critic has to give is the fruits of looking laggardly, an attention that appears in increasingly lesser quantities today, a long and sustained commitment to coaxing meaning from mute objects..

• MoMA takes on the ’60s in a welcome shakeup of the permanent collection galleries: interesting piece by Roberta Smith for The New York Times about changes at the Modern.

• Taxi Driver oral history – De Niro, Scorsese, Foster, Schrader spill all on 40th anniversary: a great read about a great film (above) from Gregg Killday at The Hollywood Reporter.

• U.S. micro-budget indie cinema: a valuable post from Girish Shambu on ‘an awful lot of good, worthy, solid – and occasionally excellent — cinema’ that you will never have heard of.

• Last film, best film?: Richard Brody at The New Yorker on the late style for film directors.

• Godard in fragments: a wonderful video essay from :: kogonada and the Criterion Collection:

Godard in Fragments from Criterion Collection on Vimeo.

• Before the Trumps, there were the Wendels: a nineteenth-century  New York property dynasty might not seem an obvious subject for a great piece of journalism, but Julie Satow at The New York Times makes it so.

• The voyeur’s motel: an astonishing tale of sex and death in America from Gay Talese in The New Yorker.

• Non-existent thrills: reviewing for the TLS Nancy Bauer’s book of feminist philosophy How to Do Things with Pornography, Kate Manne asks, ‘What do people do with, and because of, pornography? (Apart, that is, from the obvious.)’

• Metropolis – a reading list: an excellent resource from How We Get to Next in the shape of essential readings on the future of cities, compiled by Ian Steadman.

• Click 360 – C.E.R.N.: some day all documentaries will look like this – maybe; but you need to be prepared, and this BBC Taster 360 piece is an excellent place to start.

• Reimagining libraries in the digital era – lessons from data mining The Internet Archive: Kaleev Leetaru for Forbes persuasively justifies this conclusion: ‘the digital era offers an incredible opportunity for libraries to reinvent themselves as a data-rich nexus of innovation that unlocks the vast wealth of societal knowledge they hold.’

• Werkbank: perfectly complementing the previous link, this is a stimulating video about an interactive table at the Sitterwerk Art Library in Switzerland that beautifully brings together the analogue and digital.

Werkbank from Astrom / Zimmer on Vimeo.