“If there’s anything good that has come out of the financial crisis it’s the slew of high-quality graphics to help us understand what’s going on. Some [of these 27] visualizations attempt to explain it all while others focus on affected business. Others concentrate on how we, as citizens are affected.”
Tag: 03.13.09
What Will Replace Newspapers? Nothing We Know Of Yet.
In a blog post discussed far and wide, Clay Shirky observes that the advent of the Web and the current crisis of journalism are basically analogous to the revolution wrought by the printing press 500 years ago. “We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. […] Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.”
Does The Fear Of Death Move Merch?
A trio of consumer researchers finds that “thinking about one’s demise motivates people to form a strong connection to their material possessions, specifically to the brands that they have purchased. In the face of the great unknown, people develop ‘strong brand identity,’ a melding of their personalities and their possessions.”
Gossip Gets New Life
“Gossip, in its popular and journalistic forms, is the subversive revenge of the resentful over the resented, resulting in the apparently endlessly satisfying proof that celebrities, the wealthy, and the titled have lives replete with scandal, misfortune and misery. It is nearly always best done by those who feel marginalised.”
Study: Studying Music Changes The Brain
“Scans of the brains of child musicians before and after musical training have yielded compelling evidence that proficiency and skill relies on hard graft, not innate genius. Earlier studies have shown that adult musicians have different brains to adult non-musicians. But the latest results settle arguments about whether the brain differences were there from birth, or developed through practice.”
Denver MoCA Cuts Staff To Survive
The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver is eliminating four of its 20 full-time positions and trimming benefits as a hedge against potential drops in revenue as the economy worsens.
So Who Wants A CD? Turns Out, Quite A Few People…
“The future of the recording industry lies with downloading, trends suggest. It is not hard to find music lovers in their 20s who have never bought a physical CD. Yet recording companies, especially classical ones, continue to churn out CDs, and not just single discs but multidisc boxed sets.”
This Week In Recession: Museums
Museums in New York and Philadelphia are cutting jobs, slashing salaries and closing stores because their endowments have been pounded by declines in donations, government aid and investment returns.
That “New” Portrait Of Shakespeare? Not So Much, Says Adam Gopnik
“Neither image is especially masterly, or even much good at all. To use an old distinction, they’re ‘conceptual’ rather than ‘optical’–they show an assembled stack of features rather than a convincing illusion of a specific face–but the concepts are clearly articulated: he’s a bald guy with a short beard.”
American Artists Hit Hard By Unemployment
Approximately 129,000 artists were out of work nationwide in the fourth quarter of 2008, up 63 percent from the same period in 2007. “Artists are entrepreneurs in terms of their employment character. They’re the equivalent of small businesses – they require a lot more investment up front. They’re already in a pretty precarious situation. And in a market like this, artists are really hit pretty hard.”