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Today’s Cheap Knockoffs – As Good As The “Real” Thing

“To most people, counterfeiting means forged currency first and foremost. But counterfeiters are copying an ever widening range of products. For some time they have been churning out imitation designer fashion, software and CD s. Now they are copying medicines, mobile phones, food and drink, car parts and even tobacco. New technology has broadened the range of goods that are vulnerable to copying. It has dramatically improved their quality, as well as lowering their cost of production. Where once counterfeits were cheap and shoddy imitations of the real thing, today their packaging and contents (especially for digital products such as software, music CD s and film DVD s) often render them almost indistinguishable from the genuine article.”

Getting Inside Einstein

A new website explores the mind and world of Albert Einstein. “In addition to the voluminous collection of Einstein’s writings, some never before published and none previously available online, the website will house an extensive database of 40,000 documents, images and research on Einstein’s life and work, as well as digitized copies of Einstein’s professional and personal correspondence and pages from his notebooks and travel diaries.”

Reality TV That’s News Rather Than Entertainment

The cable news networks have ceased being anything about news – they’re reality entertainment vying desperately to hook our attention. So where is there decent non-fiction TV? “I?m sometimes ambivalent about the self-declared good intentions of public television, as I am about a culture that now gives trophies to kids for merely participating in a sport, regardless of how well they perform. And public television itself often seems ambivalent about its identity, unsure whether it wants to be a macramé plant holder or a shiny electric scooter from the Sharper Image. It often ends up somewhere in between, resorting to middle-of-the-road, commercial fare?Deepak Chopra, Suze Orman, nostalgic pop-music shows?to pull in money at fund-raising time. But, at the end of the day, I would, and do, support public television?s inclusiveness, with all its occasionally tedious shagginess.”

Who’s Supporting Media Deregulation? (It’s No Coincidence)

The US Senate is holding hearings on whether to deregulate media ownership. “When the Federal Communications Commission was debating whether it should give away or sell $70 billion worth of digital broadcast spectrum in 1996, newspaper editorial pages weighed in. Senator John McCain’s list, a consumer group survey, found that every paper favoring a giveaway was owned by a company that also owned television stations that, naturally, wanted the spectrum for free. Every paper opposing a giveaway was owned by a company with no substantial interest in television.” A coincidence, wondered senators…?

Pondering The Theory Years

In the most recent past, critics have returned to studying art in historical social context. The art theory years of the 60s and 70s seem like a distant past. “As we look back at the theory years today, now that the fierce polemical passions have waned, the transformation of literary studies through several phases in a single generation seems astonishing. Where did it come from? Are its sources to be found in the 1960s, the tumultuous decade in which it emerged? In the poststructuralist phase, scholarship and criticism that had been focused on individual writers gave way to a skeptical approach to all interpretation.”

Europe’s Most Wanted Art Thief

A thief has been entering important libraries in Europe and cutting out pages of rare volumes. “Such is the concern that Scotland Yard has just included him on its ‘most wanted’ list alongside men wanted for questioning about murders, sex attacks and gangland crime. He is in effect Britain’s most wanted art thief.”

Museum Director Aquitted In Goldfish Massacre

A museum director in Denmark has been aquitted in a case that charged cruelty to animals. “The exhibit at the Trapholt modern art museum in 2000 featured live goldfish swimming in a blender. Visitors were given the possibility of pressing the button to transform the fish into a runny liquid. Artist Marco Evaristti, the Chilean-born bad boy of the Danish art scene, said at the time that he wanted to force people to ‘do battle with their conscience’. Two goldfish died after two visitors pressed the button, and the Danish association Friends of Animals filed a complaint against the artist as well as the director of the museum, Peter Meyer, for cruelty to animals.”

A $27 Million Van Gogh – $75 At A Time

The owner of the cafe that Van Gogh frequented wants to buy one of the master’s paintings and hang it there. He “recently negotiated to buy ‘Field and poppies’, painted just two weeks before Van Gogh?s death. For most of the past 50 or so years it has been hidden away in a Swiss private collection. The audacious plan is to raise the $27 million in just 30 months, by selling shares for $75 each. Under this scheme, donors will own a tiny share in the painting, which is to belong to the non-profitmaking Institut Van Gogh. A discreet camera will be mounted in the attic room, enabling shareholders to view the painting in ‘real time’ on the internet. It will require over 300,000 people to take up the offer.”

Afghan Art Still Being Stolen

Art pillaging in Afghanistan hasn’t slowed any since the Americans came. “For decades, war and gnawing poverty made Afghanistan fertile ground for thieves and smugglers. Looters have cleared the shelves in Afghanistan’s museums and left deep hollows in the earth of its ancient sites, where Buddhist, Greek, Zoroastrian and early Islamic civilizations once flourished. Yet even with the U.S.-backed government of Hamid Karzai in place and an international community eager to support cultural preservation, large-scale looting of Afghanistan’s archeological sites goes on.”