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Holmes – The Case Of The Enduring Detective

Sherlock Holmes has had one of the most enduring afterlifes in all of literature. “Holmes has become a one-man entertainment complex. He has been the subject of at least 100 movies and nearly as many plays and radio dramas, and he has inspired an entire library’s worth of books. There have been countless sequels and knockoffs…” So why does Holmes continue to fascinate us?

Getty Curator Indicted In Italy

A Getty curator has been indicted in Italy on charges of plundering antiquities. “Marion True, 56, curator for antiquities at the museum and director of the Getty Villa, is accused of criminal conspiracy to receive stolen goods and illicit receipt of archeological items. It is also alleged that True in effect laundered goods that were purchased by a private collection and then sold to the Getty in paper transactions that created phony documentation.”

MoMA Buys Land For Expansion

Barley into its big new home, the Museum of Modern Art has bought the land immediately west of its location for future expansion. “The museum is thinking of constructing a project on the new land, but notes that the air rights over the space far exceed the gallery needs of the museum. Therefore, he says the likely outcome will be additional galleries with space above for commercial use.”

Physics of Dance (Or Dance Of Physics)

A choreographer and a theoretical physicist team up to create dance of three of Einstein’s papers. “Of all the art forms that one can use to express the notion of here, now and what happens then, dance is probably the best. In some sense, there are ways you can represent equations by movement because they often describe movement. The equations and ideas in Einstein’s papers are very dynamical. Dance is better suited to the 1905 papers than any of the other visual arts.”

Why People Are Abandoning The Movie Theatre

Movie attendance is falling, and even the expected mega-hit Star Wars installment isn’t likely to turn things around. “If Americans went to the movies every week, as they did during cinema’s heyday in the 1940s, the national box office would be running about $2 billion a week, which it’s not even close to. Audiences have cooled on the moviegoing experience, in which high ticket and food prices and hit-or-miss sound and projection systems in neighborhood theaters have driven people to create their own Friday night popcorn experience.”

Sifton Named To Run NYT Culture Pages

Sam Sifton has been named culture editor of the New York Times. “He has demonstrated a strong sense of the intersecting worlds of the arts, a powerful devotion to strengthening the reporting tradition in Culture, and a coherent vision of how the disparate pieces of that complex department fit together. Sam has an impresario’s gift for matching writers with ideas.”

You’ll Need A Fingerprint To Watch A DVD?

A proposed new security system for DVDs would add an RFID tag and require biometric information to view the disk. “At the store, someone buying a new DVD would have to provide a password or some kind of biometric data, like a fingerprint or iris scan, which would be added to the DVD’s RFID tag. Then, when the DVD was popped into a specially equipped DVD player, the viewer would be required to re-enter his or her password or fingerprint. The system would require consumers to buy new DVD players with RFID readers.”

If It Bleeds… It Gets A Museum

What’s with this boom in museums devoted to conflict and/or atrocities? “This mania for memorial museums is a sign of a society with an unhealthy obsession. These new museums indicate a desire to elevate the worst aspects of mankind’s history as a way to understand humanity today. Our pessimism-tinted spectacles distort how we interpret the past. These museums tend to downplay historical exhibits, since the aim is to make yesterday’s conflicts relevant to today.”