“Call it the Age of Peer Production. From Amazon.com to MySpace to craigslist, the most successful Web companies are building business models based on user-generated content. This is perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of the second-generation Web. The tools of production, from blogging to video-sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale.”
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The Museum Will Be Podcast
“Thanks to podcasting, it’s becoming as easy to download a museum visit onto a portable digital audio player as it is a pop tune. And museums, realizing this is a way to reach a younger generation of potential patrons, are racing to get involved. They are making their in-house audio tours of special exhibits, as well as original programming, available on their websites for free use on iPods and other MP3 players. And art lovers can listen through their home computers as well. There’s even a newly coined term for the phenomenon – ‘artcasting’.”
Art To Help You Break The Law
“Travelling Guide is written in the style of a guide-book, but is not intended for affluent Western tourists. It is a piece of controversial art which aims to ‘subvert the language and purpose of the format’, speaking directly to Romanian travellers and illegal immigrant workers, helping them through border controls, ports and stations into Western Europe. It contains instructions on acquiring forged identity papers, fake UK national insurance numbers, includes a bar chart grading the risk factor at each crossing point, instructions on breaking into shipping containers and safety tips.”
Your TV Online – Everyone’s Doing It
New internet-only TV shows are an indication of how hot online video has become. “The inter-tube trend has been ongoing since the late ’90s, but slow connections, poor buffering and small screens hampered it from gaining a mainstream following. Now, with over two-thirds of Internet users paying for broadband connections, the inter-tube is taking off.”
The Conductor Who Stayed Too Long?
The Seattle Symphony is in turmoil after the orchestra renewed music director Gerard Schwarz’s contract. “The larger question — how long before a music director overstays his welcome? — is pressingly relevant to any orchestra. And as the turbulence up north suggests, the answer is that the cutoff date comes sooner than some people are willing to believe.”
Berkeley Rep’s Grand Plan
Berkeley Repertory Theatre is embarking on an ambitious project, says artistic director Tony Taccone. “The lion’s share, he says, ‘is an artistic endowment’ to fund a program for creating work, modeled, on a smaller scale, on the extensive program at England’s National Theatre. The project is designed to commission 30 to 70 plays in the next 10 years, not all of which would end up being produced by the Rep. Each would receive at least a staged reading or workshop. Some would become part of future Rep seasons, if not on one of its current stages, then in a new, 150-seat house to be developed under the endowment.”
It’s Summer, And Basel’s Art Awaits
“Every art institution here seems so dazzlingly meticulous and thought out, with their clean, uncluttered galleries, thorough exhibitions and, often, interesting yet unobtrusive architecture. Museum shops featuring mostly (gasp) catalogs and postcards, and the sense of physical hospitality alone can amaze, as with the leather armchairs in which you can read, doze or watch people in the upstairs lobby of the Basel Kunstmuseum. It’s easy to feel that museums back home have a lot to learn.”
It’s Hot – All About The Video
“The success of YouTube, which a half-year after its launch is streaming more than 50 million video clips a day, has spawned 180 video sites in the past three months alone. Visits to online video sites have increased fourfold in the past six months. Online video has become the latest evolution in consumer-generated content.”
Pressure Mounts On Iran To Release Philosopher
“International pressure is growing on Iran to release a prominent philosopher and writer, Ramin Jahanbegloo, who was arrested two months ago on unspecified charges. is incarceration in the notorious Evin prison has left Tehran’s intellectual circles concerned about his fate and their own.”
Expert Says Met’s $50 Million Painting Is A Fake
When the Metropolitan Museum bought Duccio’s Madonna and Child last year for a reported $50 million, the painting was hailed as a masterpiece. Now James Beck, a leading art historian and Professor of Art History at Columbia University in New York, believes that the painting, which the Met dates to 1300, is not by Duccio at all. “It is a fake based upon indications found in works by or associated with Duccio. It is not even a good forgery.”