Required Reading

This week, commercializing museums, map of literary road trips, designing masculinity, McDonald’s in Alaska, new Tokyo Olympic logo, John Waters says don’t smoke, and more.

 Christopher Knight of the LA Times is disturbed by the “relentless commercialization” of museums in the US:

For-profit art dealers are organizing shows for nonprofit museums. Museum professionals are organizing shows for commercial art fairs and galleries. Museum collections are being monetized, rented out for profit to other museums and private corporations. Corporations are co-organizing museum shows.

Nonprofit status subsidizes museums through the public tax code. The status was invented more than a century ago to foster diversity of independent thought, free from the narrow economic demands of business or the ideological commands of government. Today, that independence is being corrupted as the wall separating art museums from business activities is crumbling.

In fact, so commonplace is the boundary-blurring that few any longer notice. A new normal is in the making.

 Presenting Old Masters BuzzFeed, where ridiculous BuzzFeed headlines (usually lists) meet Old Master paintings:

 How Esquire magazine helped to “design” masculinity in the US:

One of the central issues of Esquire’s content during and after the war was that masculinity was constantly under threat, mostly from women and the increasingly stratified corporate work system. At the same time as domesticity was supposedly squeezing men into submission, so too was corporate work culture.

 Atlas Obscura has a great map of literary road trips, from Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012):

 Essayist and Alaska native Elisabeth Fairfield Stokes writes about the “technicolor fantasy of McDonald’s“:

We went into Fairbanks a few times each year; whenever we flew in a visit to McDonald’s was almost guaranteed. Everyone from the villages went to McDonald’s if they could: eating there meant participating in a world we, kids from “the bush” (a general way of referring to rural Alaska), didn’t feel like we had access to, but could only admire from afar. Going into Fairbanks and eating at McDonald’s conferred status.

 This graphic showing traffic fatalities per 100,000 people in select world cities is surprising (via @adbafo) :

 This week the official Tokyo 2020 emblems for the Olympic and Paralympic Games were unveiled. Designed by Kenjiro Sano, they are a far cry from the wonky London 2012 Olympic logo:

 For those in NYC, WNYC has developed an ice cream “radar” site.

 Surfer Mike Fanning was attacked by a shark at the J-Bay Open (he’s thankfully unharmed):

 And presenting John Waters’s funny no smoking commercial from decades ago:

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, 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.