Pantone announced that PANTONE 18-3838 Ultra Violet is the color of 2018. Now, let’s see if they’re right. (via Pantone)

  • William Henry Fox Talbot may have been a pioneering photographer but his images are very sensitive to light, which makes looking at them very difficult. Max Campbell considers that fragility:

Talbot’s pioneering images—which the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library is currently in the process of digitizing—are a window into his obsessions, both alchemical and aesthetic. A bust of Patroclus speaks to Talbot’s classical interests, and also to his understanding that photographing white surfaces allowed for more manageable exposure times. When he brought his camera to Oxford’s campus to document the university’s architecture, he was working to insure that he could capture detail beyond the formal scenes he had been arranging at his estate, and was also enchanted by the idea of imbuing his images with a historical quality that might help them transcend his era. But among the reported twenty-five thousand or so extant negatives and prints that Oxford aims to gather, there are a number that are completely indecipherable. Each of these apparently blank pieces of paper likely showed an image at some point—maybe a detail of some lace (Talbot’s mother had been a serious collector) or an arrangement of objects on the grounds of the family abbey—but now bears just smudges or darkened corners. These traces of failed and faded images make evident the challenge that Talbot spent his life working to solve: finding a way to take and then fix photographs on paper. The fleeting record of a leaf’s outline may have pleased him initially, but by the end of his career he was disappointed that detailed images printed on paper were fading over time.

Nailed it from trippinthroughtime

  • Artist Tia-Simone Gardner discusses the mobile tiny house she’s developing called The Inhabitation Project, and the “balance between stability, mobility, and intimacy in artists’ connections to place”:

Gardner: There is that paradox there. I don’t want to generalize or over-romanticize the artist, but we do have to have some flexibility. As an artist, you are not a fixed spectator anymore. I mean, there are fixed spectators.

Klaark: Yeah, absolutely.

Gardner: There are fixed spectators. But I think more and more, our careers require travel.

Klaark: And the needs of our work too, the work that we are making. But then it leads to the question: What is feeding the other? Is our work adapting to imposed structures, or is it leading the discussion? Especially because where funds come from and how they are used—even if they are unrestricted—do set up a foundation for something to exist.

Gardner: These are the things I struggle with—wanting to have flexibility to make work at home. Home is Alabama. There are ways of working, and working with people, that I feel like I have a better understanding of because I grew up with it. I have time, depth, and kinship. I have those things that make it feel somehow less of something and more of something else. I know that place, so I can work in a way that is more intuitive. I know who to go ask questions of. There is some small claim that I don’t have here. There is also work that I don’t know I would be able to do there, because the resources aren’t there. How do you make the projects you want to make with care, caution, respect? How do you do that with compassion and with a humanist, feminist approach?

“Naruto’s historic selfie challenged the idea of who is a person and who is not and resulted in the first-ever lawsuit seeking to declare a non-human animal the owner of property, rather than being declared property himself,” PETA Founder Ingrid Newkirk said in a statement.

The court case set off an international debate among legal experts about personhood for animals and whether they can own property.

Next, he decided to turn the Met’s 1970 centennial into an 18-month cavalcade of exhibitions and concerts — Nina Simone! “Harlem on My Mind”! Original fanfares by Bernstein and Copland! He also hired an architecture firm to come up with a master plan, filling out the footprint and opening up the façade. “I want a new attitude,” he told the architects. “The ‘new’ Met must proclaim in a very loud voice, ‘Welcome.’”

Eight years later, more than a million King Tut visitors poured into a museum Hoving had utterly transformed. First there was the exhibit itself, a feat of storytelling. Objects were arranged in order of their excavation, to give a sense of the archaeologists’ own discovery, accompanied by contemporaneous photographs and crisp wall text. Some exhibit windows opened onto the brand-new Sackler wing, a hangar-sized jewel box built to house the newly installed Temple of Dendur. Beyond these capstones of Hoving’s renewal were acres of flashy new wings, departments, acquisitions, and exhibits. As Hoving’s long-serving successor, Philippe de Montebello, would recall at the former’s memorial in 2009, this was the beginning of “what I am convinced will someday be called the Hoving era,” a time when, “if Coleridge will forgive me, the caverns heretofore largely measureless to man were transformed into stately pleasure domes, now accessible to all.”

The Met show gives us an intimate portrait of this new Michelangelo, the wealthy gentleman-artist who cultivated a circle of noble friends. Michelangelo was regarded as a difficult man by his patrons and rival artists, but in fact he had many warm friendships with family members and associates of various kinds. He also had several romantic but (perhaps) physically innocent relationships with handsome young noblemen. The most famous of these was Tommaso dei Cavalieri, who was probably around seventeen or eighteen when Michelangelo first met him in 1532 at the age of fifty-seven. The older man addressed to him many passionate sonnets that puts one irresistibly in mind of Shakespeare. He also sent his “messer Tomao [Tommy], my dearest lord,” gifts of highly finished drawings, several of which are included in the exhibition. The exhibition is particularly rich in such disegni finiti, and it is these that will probably offer the most pleasure to the casual museum visitor. They are private drawings, meant to be seen only by select audiences or close friends, and thus all the more revealing.

  • nine yamamoto-masson writes about men who use the premise of “artistic collaboration” to mine womxn for emotional labour. They write:

Why is is that many men often think that because we are interested in collaborating with them it automatically means we are interested in sleeping with them? Why is it that this notion of “collaboration” had been so eroticised, so weaponised in their heads as a method to get sex that so many womxn artists have experienced sexual assault, and/or romanticised emotional manipulation in these “collaborations” (or promises thereof)?

The Mansion of Happiness spawned a slew of imitations, both from Ives and its competitors. In 1875 the McLoughlin Brothers of New York City published a similar game called The Games of the Pilgrim’s Progress, where players began at the City of Destruction and passed abstract scenes such as The Cross and The Valley of Death before attaining final victory in The Celestial City.

Ives also branched out into other genres to spread its evangelical message—in 1844 they published the ludicrously titled strategy game The Game of Pope and Pagan or Siege of the Stronghold of Satan by the Christian Army. In this not-at-all-offensive (that is, extremely offensive) title—which sported board art of half-unclothed “natives” gathering around a roaring fire—the player takes charge of “a band of devoted missionaries” as they attack “the strong-hold of Satan, defended by [the] papal and pagan Antichrist.”

“Most historians of my generation were brought up with the idea that Aboriginal people were killed in ones or twos, similar to how settlers were killed when there’d been a dispute over stock, or women,” Ryan told me recently, at an art gallery in Sydney’s vibrant neighborhood of Kings Cross, where she was about to give a talk. Ryan, who is seventy-four, has short-cropped white hair and a slow, deliberate way of speaking that belies a very quick mind. She realized, once she’d started researching massacres, how many of her peers were still deeply in denial about the past. “People would say to me, ‘We will never know how many massacres there were, or how many Aboriginal people were killed, so what’s the point in trying to find out?’ But they would never say that about World War One or Two.”

  • If you’ve ever wondered about the routes animals travel in city and beyond, this post will really interest you:

This one demonstrates the routes of gulls in one region of Western Europe (via Guardian)

On why he thinks Congress may not be hopeless:

The U.S. Congress does support solar and wind subsidies, which have been quite generous. So Congress isn’t completely absent on this. The House actually passed a climate-change bill [in 2009], when it was a Democratic Congress. There’s a class of voters who care about this, that I think both parties should want to compete for. So I don’t think it’s hopeless, because it’s about American innovation, American jobs, American leadership, and there are examples where this has gone very, very well.

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.

Hrag Vartanian is editor-in-chief and co-founder of Hyperallergic.