“The closely-watched case, which involved major studios such as Warner Bros, Disney, Paramount, Columbia and Twentieth Century Fox, was seen as an ambitious attempt to force ISPs to act against piracy.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Cate Blanchett: Value Of Arts Doesn’t Translate To A Graph
“We can justify ourselves with economic indicators and KPIs and graphs and acquittals but it just makes us look like any other industry, and we are not. The arts operate at the core of human identity and existence. They operate at the cutting edge of a science that is now trying to unravel the puzzle of consciousness and identity.”
Christie’s Settles Suit Over Titian It Failed To Recognize
A brother and sister sued the auction house after their painting, identified by Christie’s as “from the school of Titian” and sold for 8,000 pounds, was later identified as the real thing and “put up for sale by rival auctioneers Sotheby’s for a guide price of $4- $6 million.”
Mourning The Loss Of The Contralto
In today’s classical music, “there are only mezzo-sopranos: should you wish to employ a contralto, you will search the websites of singers’ agents in vain. Have women’s voices changed over the past 50 years, as the result of something put in the water or taken out of the diet? Or have contraltos merely gone into embarrassed hiding?”
Beijing Artists Protest Attack, Demolition Of Their Homes
Development “threatens at least 10 clusters of studios where artists live and work on the fringes of the city. … Many artists are furious because they were lured to the villages with long-term leases — some for nearly 20 years — and encouraged to invest their life savings in renovations.”
Today In Predictable News: Attendance Up At Free Venues
The Association of Leading Visitor Attractions reports rises last year “at free venues such as the National Gallery (up 9% with 4.78m visitors) and the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich (up 15% to 2.37m). Alva said the increases came as people sought good value days out during the economic downturn.”
Writer Tries To Understand Composers — By Becoming One
“As the day of the first class approached, I got a little anxious. Would I be expected to actually write some music? After all, at the final class, [American Composers Orchestra] musicians were going to be on hand to play some of the new compositions. And how could I possibly pull something (music) out of nothing (thin air)?”
Besieged By Flashes, National Archives Bans Photos
“In an effort to safeguard the original record copies of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the National Archives has decided to ban all photography in the Rotunda, where the historical documents are displayed.” The ink is looking pretty faded by now.
Italy’s Venice Pavilion, MaXXi Entrusted To Anti-Modernist
“The appointment of Vittorio Sgarbi, the celebrity art critic and polemicist, as curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale and supervisor of acquisitions at Rome’s new MaXXi museum of 21st-century art is dividing the Italian art world, thanks to his well known antipathy to contemporary art.”
E-Bibles At Forefront Of Reading-Technology Revolution
“If you want to see what a 21st century reading experience should look like — one that enables you to bookmark, notate, listen to, and share passages instantly on Facebook and Twitter — the marketplace you’re looking for is e-Bibles. At the time of this writing, six of the top 20 most popular paid e-books in the Apple App Store are Bibles.”