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Iran Accuses Farmers Of Cultural plunder

“Iranian cultural heritage officials are on a collision course with rural communities after embarking on a legal crusade to reclaim the hills and nearby land on which, they believe, once stood the city of Jondishapour, where the Persian King Shapour I vanquished the Roman emperor Valerian more than 1,700 years ago. They have issued cultivation bans and pressed criminal charges against dozens of farmers accused of destroying parts of the archaeologically sensitive 300-hectare (741-acre) site.”

Tate Admits Error In Ofili Purchase

The Tate now says it made a “technical error” in seeking money from the National Art Collection Fund to buy a work by Chris Ofili, one of the Tate’s trustees. “The Tate did not tell the fund it had already committed itself to purchasing The Upper Room when it made its application in November 2004. Last month Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota wrote a letter to the body offering to repay its £75,000 grant.”

Next: TV’s Reinvented Business Model

“The iPod video player doesn’t matter. Downloading episodes of ‘Lost’ and ‘Desperate Housewives’ to computers barely matters. What does matter is the crack in the traditional television business model. Some networks already have skipped the traditional television model and started shipping shows, some of which are produced for online audiences only, directly to the Web. With the growth of broadband, up from 25.3 million households in 2003 to an estimated 42.3 million this year, watching the shows on computers has become easier.”

Why Indy Ballet Went Down

Why did Indianapolis’s Internationale Ballet go out of business? Insufficient ticket sales, a decline in donations, rising expenses and the lack of an endowment. “The sad thing is we are at a time when Indianapolis has an appetite for something other than sports. And when sports can get the support of government, what you have is a situation where, in many ways, the commitment to the arts is expressed more in words than in actions.”

The Future Of Books In A Digital World

“Because books and their metadata have, until recently, been physical objects, we’ve had to pick one and only one way to order them in defined, stable ways. When Melvil Dewey introduced the Dewey decimal classification system in 1876, it was an advance because it shelved books by topic, making the library’s floor plan into a browsable representation of the order of knowledge itself. But no one classification can represent everyone’s way of organizing the world. You may file a field guide to the birds under natural history, while someone else files it under great examples of the illustrative art and I file it under good eating. The digital world makes it possible for the first time to escape this limitation. Publishers, libraries, even readers can potentially create as many classification schemes as we want. But to do this, we’ll need two things.”

Of Icons And Movie Stars

“At least for the moment, movie stars still serve as the gold standard of modern fame. Indeed, the rise of cheap, interchangeable, mass-produced celebrity may have endowed those whose primary medium is the big screen with a bit of added gravity, renewing their license to be taken (or to take themselves) seriously. Their fame remains a unique form of cultural capital, a resource that can sometimes be converted into influence or power.”

Most of Stolen Iraqi Art Still Not Recovered

Of the some 14,000 artifacts stolen in Iraq, only about 5,500 have been recovered. “US military sources say forces in Iraq have no systematic way of investigating the missing objects, and in the ongoing insurgency neither US or Iraqi forces can justify using scarce manpower to guard sites in the countryside, where widespread looting has continued since the March 2003 US invasion. Law enforcement organizations worldwide are chasing the lost items, but their representatives said there is no systematic coordination, and they are relying on a shifting set of ad hoc partnerships to bring the thieves to account.”