Category: issues

“The founder of Techdirt, Michael Masnick, has released a provocative new report (pdf) called The Sky is Rising!, in which he argues that the degree to which the internet is harming the creative industries has been grossly overstated.”

“The sense of many is that things must change — our art must change, our approach to marketing must change and the nature of the audience experience must change. If we continue to operate in the same manner as we did in the twentieth century, the arts will die. A serious discussion of audience engagement, however, demands more than platitudes and generalizations.”

“Fans in the crowd won’t be allowed to upload snippets of the day’s action to YouTube – or even, potentially, to post their snaps from inside the Olympic Village on Facebook. And a crack team of branding “police”, the Games organisers Locog have acknowledged, will be checking every bathroom in every Olympic venue – with the power to remove or tape over manufacturers’ logos even on soap dispensers, wash basins and toilets.”

“Georgia Institute of Technology professor Philip Auslander first floated the idea that live and mediated performances weren’t really all that different in his 1999 book, Liveness. As the performance scholar pointed out, the very idea of “live performance” came about only when recording technologies created Coachella-style confusion by making the two indistinguishable.”

“The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide the global reach of U.S. copyright law, in a case testing whether an overseas purchaser of a copyrighted work may resell it in the United States without the copyright holder’s permission.”

Fashion designer-turned-real estate magnate Alan Faena is creating “a sort of Shoreditch-by-the-River-Plate for culture-starved Argentines” in the waterfront neighborhood of Puerto Madero. The district already has a new visual art center; there are plans for a hotel by Philippe Starck, a residential complex designed by Norman Foster, and “parks, cultural centres and an artist residency.”

“Steve Jobs, it seems, understood intuitively an important facet of our minds: we like to know where things come from. We like stories. We like nice tales. We need our myths, our origins, our creations.”

“The afterlife of the artist is a tricky thing. Some bestselling writers seem to be forgotten mere seconds after their deaths; others aren’t truly appreciated until decades into their posthumous career. Many artists and writers are subjects of campaigns to re-establish their place in the canon. A few take, but most fall back into oblivion until someone else takes up the cause 10 years later.”

“Almost no new malls are being built any more anywhere in the country. In fact there are scores of malls that are dead and abandoned. Many others are on life-support and are close to being boarded up or redeveloped into more productive use.”

The New York Public Library has instituted a public relations blitz to respond to its critics (including literary and scholarly luminaries), who “question how users of the libraries to be sold will fit inside the main building (its number of annual visitors — 1.6 million — is expected to more than double) and whether books moved to New Jersey really will be available within 24 hours, as the library has promised.”