Required Reading

This week, Picasso Museum problems, Sweden’s font, content moderators, Frank Gehry’s f-you, John Constable reconsidered, the endangered bookshops of New York, and more.

 The Picasso Museum in Paris has been engulfed by controversy for years. Is that over? Doesn’t appear so.

As the conflict inside the Picasso Museum started to spill into the media, the French state took an acute interest in its problems. Aurélie Filippetti, France’s minister for culture and communications, appointed a consultancy to investigate the situation; they reported that Baldassari refused to change her management style. “There was a social emergency” inside the museum, Filippetti told me. “She had very bad relations with other museums.”

Finally, on 11 May, Noce revealed in a second Libération scoop that more than half of the museum’s 40 staff members had signed an email demanding Baldassari’s dismissal, accusing her of “authoritarianism, partiality and managerial methods which have led the Picasso Museum into an impasse”. The gossip traded by Baldassari’s critics had become world news. “The mental and physical health of dozens of officials,” the staff letter continued, “and the world reputation of a museum which is already seriously isolated, cannot continue to be under threat in order to keep one sole person in office, which is now unjustified.”

Two days later, Filippetti summoned Baldassari to her office. “It was not a pleasure to have to ask her to resign,” Filippetti told me. “She’s a good curator but she was not a good president. Many people had quit and were not able to work with her any more. The person in charge of the building workers had quit. She had pushed two second-in-commands to quit. Nobody was able to work with her on the building. The museum could not open with her as president. That became clear at the beginning of the year.”

 The country of Sweden has its own font:

Sans is meant to encapsulate fuzzy Scandinavian concepts — progressivism, authenticity, lagom (Swedish for “just the right amount”). So how does it do it? “It’s a pretty open typeface. They’re simple shapes,” Hattenbach says over the phone. “We’ve worked on the spaces between the letters to try to keep it light and airy.” Wide holes inside of an enclosed “p” or “o” might have the same effect. To a type nerd, things get technical, and fast.

 Adrian Chen takes a look at the content moderators who keep the dick pics and other questionable material from your social media feeds:

A list of categories, scrawled on a whiteboard, reminds the workers of what they’re hunting for: pornography, gore, minors, sexual solicitation, sexual body parts/images, racism. When Baybayan sees a potential violation, he drills in on it to confirm, then sends it away—erasing it from the user’s account and the service altogether—and moves back to the grid. Within 25 minutes, Baybayan has eliminated an impressive variety of dick pics, thong shots, exotic objects inserted into bodies, hateful taunts, and requests for oral sex.

More difficult is a post that features a stock image of a man’s chiseled torso, overlaid with the text “I want to have a gay experience, M18 here.” Is this the confession of a hidden desire (allowed) or a hookup request (forbidden)? Baybayan—who, like most employees of TaskUs, has a college degree—spoke thoughtfully about how to judge this distinction.

“What is the intention?” Baybayan says. “You have to determine the difference between thought and solicitation.” He has only a few seconds to decide. New posts are appearing constantly at the top of the screen, pushing the others down. He judges the post to be sexual solicitation and deletes it; somewhere, a horny teen’s hopes are dashed. Baybayan scrolls back to the top of the screen and begins scanning again.

 Architect Frank Gehry says 98% of what’s built is bad:

According to a report in Spanish newspaper El Mundo, a journalist asked the architect what his response was to people who accused him of creating architecture for show.

“Let me tell you one thing. In the world we live in, 98 per cent of what gets built and designed today is pure shit,” responded Gehry after raising his middle finger. “There’s no sense of design nor respect for humanity or anything. They’re bad buildings and that’s it.”

Perhaps related … Chinese president Xi Jinping called for an end to the “weird architecture” that has come as a result of China’s construction boom:

“Fine art works should be like sunshine from the blue sky and the breeze in spring that will inspire minds, warm hearts, cultivate taste and clean up undesirable work styles,” he said.

 Artist Hans Haacke has a new show, but how does he stay true to his criticality?

Asked whether he is ever uncomfortable being part of the same cultural-financial-political system he criticizes so vociferously, he smiled and said: “Yes, you do get your hands dirty, so to speak, and if you stay out of it, you might be pure. But you might also have no effect whatsoever. Unless you want to start throwing bombs, but that’s another story.”

 A look at the John Constable show at the V&A museum in London:

While his contemporary Turner bestrides the history of European art, Constable remains a largely domestic taste. There was a time when almost every home had a reproduction of “The Hay Wain.” Tours of ‘Constable country’ on the Essex-Suffolk border were popular by 1893 and are still going strong. It all contributes to the image of a local artist painting agreeable scenes. Those who have looked more closely at his work have seen more in it, but disagree about what the more is. Roger Fry admired the energy of the sketches, the aspect of Constable that flatters posterity by seeming to point to Post-Impressionism and abstraction. Kenneth Clark also thought that the sketches had a ‘force of sensation’, but found the finished oils a ‘bore’. John Berger took the opposite view, that the completed works were rich in brilliant light effects, but the sketches were weakened by vague Romanticism. More recent left-wing critiques, especially since John Barrell’s The Dark Side of the Landscape appeared in 1980, have disagreed again, taking Constable to task as a reactionary Tory, sentimentalising and tidying up the rural poor.

 Do you want to know how many Instragram photos are uploaded every day? This will give you a sense of scale.

 The guide to “flinging” Oscar Wilde.

 There is one aspect of the Ebola epidemic that should make us scared, and it isn’t the virus itself but the lack of a solid global infrastructure to respond to it:

A few weeks ago, the United Nations Secretary general Ban Ki Moon asked for about $1 billion to contain this epidemic, in 2014, before it settled for good. (Travel restrictions work if the affected are small numbers, and will not work when we have millions of cases — a few will get out within the incubation period and remember — this disease does not just travel on dark-skinned people.)

Further, the longer we allow Ebola to experiment on us, the more dangerous it may get. A version with a slightly lower fatality rate along with a longer incubation period may be very, very hard to contain.

One billion dollars. About 1/16th of a WhatsApp. One blockbuster movie.

This is but a rounding error for the global economy. It is a meager amount needed, to forestall having to lose much, much, much more later.

And the United Nations reported that it had received about $100K deposited (you read that right) and only about $250 million were made in commitments, that may or may not arrive in time.

 Renowned Hollywood producer and screenwriter James Schamus has produced a film about money for We the Economy (here’s part 2):

 The endangered bookstores of New York:

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning EST, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.