Sunday 3 September 2017

Reading list, 3 September 2017

After the backlash to her essay on Katherine Middleton on her marriage to Prince William, now Hilary Mantel wonderfully takes on the Diana myth.

I'm interested at the moment in the stereotypes that museum reverse-promote about themselves, like this one from the director of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, which has just re-opened after an upgrade:
Some museum purists may disapprove of the more accessible labels. “The art historians here on campus, they would prefer everything was just a tombstone, because the students come in here and just copy [the] labels down,” Dietrich said. “You can never make everybody happy.”
Grutas Park, a sculpture garden in south-west Lithuania, shows one way of dealing with statues and monuments that have been rejected from public places:
The figures are grouped according to their role in Soviet activity: the Totalitarian Sphere depicts key thinkers and prominent leaders; the Red Sphere features members of the resistance; the Death sphere shows the bloody means by which the regimes were kept in place. Indeed, the park allows the spectre of suffering to loom in the background by recreating gulag blocks, guard towers and barbed-wire fences.
Honestly, just batshit: Famed architect Frank Gehry to design Extreme Model Railroad and Contemporary Architecture Museum.

The NYT profiles Elaine Welteroth, editor of Teen Vogue and tasked with "reinventing the glossy magazine for a hyperempathetic generation".




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