Category: today’s top story

“Dave Hickey, a curator, professor and author known for a passionate defence of beauty in his collection of essays The Invisible Dragon and his wide-ranging cultural criticism, is walking away from a world he says is calcified, self-reverential and a hostage to rich collectors who have no respect for what they are doing.”

“[He] was a major figure in the music of the past half-century and the leading German composer of the post-1945 era; but he was often at odds with his native country politically and aesthetically. … At one time a strict adherent to the serial technique of composition, he later abandoned it. Declaring his belief in melody, he was regarded by the avant-garde as a traitor to the cause.”

“[He was] a Columbia University historian and administrator whose sheer breadth of scholarship – culminating in a survey of 500 years of Western civilization [From Dawn to Decadence] – brought him renown as one of the foremost intellectuals of the 20th century.”

It’s the world’s second-tallest tower, with a clockface visible 30 km away and searchlights shooting 10 km into the sky, featuring hotel suites costing up to $7,000 a night during the Hajj, all perched atop a massive high-end shopping mall and directly overlooking Islam’s holiest site. The Abraj al-Bait is the mammoth anchor of a slew of luxury slabs going up all over Mecca – towers for which the historic parts of the city are being razed.

“Here’s the reality. If the cable bundle dissolves, buying the TV you love on-demand would probably be either much more expensive than you’d think … or much lower quality than you’d accept.”

“According to Linn Nygaard, an IT consultant living in Norway, Amazon remotely wiped her Kindle and closed her Amazon account for as yet unspecified violations to its terms of service. It’s frightening evidence that when you buy into an ecosystem built on DRM, while you may own your device, you don’t own the data that lives on it.”

“Union players at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra did not vote on an offer from management, and the board of directors shut the doors and canceled concerts through Nov. 4. In a lockout, players may not report for work and they receive no pay.”

A solitary map hoarder dies, and the L.A. Public Library gets a million (yes, a million) maps, including one from 1592.

“Two opposing camps are battling it out for domination of the international contemporary art world. On the one hand, the huge globalised art dealerships catering to the international super-rich – those individuals so dazzlingly wealthy as to be immune to the economic crisis. And on the other, a vision of art that is politically engaged, historically aware and socially inclusive.”