“Call it collateral damage in the ongoing war against copyright infringement. Technologies that were designed to combat file sharing and copyright infringement have also limited the average consumer’s ability to make personal copies of legally purchased media.”
Tag: 11.13.05
Prize Possession: Competing For Taste
Prizes have shaped and transformed our taste over the years. “It’s not just the Oscars, the Emmys, the Pulitzers and the Nobels. It’s the film festivals, best-of lists, poetry contests, architectural competitions and international pressure-cookers that serve up the next piano star.”
Richmond Committee To Study Performing Arts Center Plans
Richmond Virginia mayor Douglas Wilder has formed a new committee to study controversial plans for a new downtown performing arts center. “Wilder and the arts foundation have clashed in recent months over the foundation’s plans to expand and renovate the Carpenter Center and surround it with additional arts venues.”
Securing The Walrus
“The Walrus Foundation has finally obtained charitable status from the federal government, assuring the future of The Walrus magazine. The award-winning magazine, when launched in Sept. 2003, had proclaimed itself Canada’s Harper’s, Atlantic and Mother Jones — essential U.S. periodicals that are also supported by non-profit foundations. The Walrus was underpinned by $1 million annually for five years, to come from the Montreal-based Chawkers charitable foundation. But the money could not flow to the Walrus Foundation until its charitable status, too, was confirmed by Revenue Canada.”
TV Show Snubs Scottish Sculpture
A British TV show holding a contest to find the 100 best public sculptures has decided nothing in Scotland is good enough to be considered. “The programme makers told Scotland on Sunday that when they looked for the nation’s 100 best public sculptures they decided that, compared with England, Scotland had failed to invest in public sculpture, especially in the 20th century. The humiliating snub has sparked outrage in Scotland, with experts north of the Border accusing Artsworld of ‘geographical snobbery’ and ‘cultural ignorance’.”
Shulgold: A Second Listen To Denver’s Opera House
Marc Shulgold has some misgivings about Denver’s new opera house. It’s a cold space, for one. “Acoustically, the Ellie is quite nice. But then, great pains were taken to create a natural, unamplified space for singers. Still, this was not the vibrant, room-filling sound we had expected. From downstairs, the singing and talking during Carmen often faded away if the performers didn’t project out to the house or put some oomph in their delivery.”
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.”
Entertainment Unions: Regulate Hidden Ads
“Hollywood writers and actors are calling for a code of conduct to govern a growing trend of hidden advertising in TV shows and films, and they say they will appeal to federal regulators if studios don’t respond. The also want their share of the billions of dollars in advertising revenue generated by what they write and act in, their unions say.”
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.”