Legal music downloads will soon surpass illegal downloads. “Around 35% of music consumers now download tracks legally via the Internet and the percentage will soon pass the 40% who have pirated music, according to a new survey released Monday by Entertainment Media Research.”
Tag: 06.20.05
Opera 1, Moths 0
London’s Covent Garden has come up with a solution to a costly moth problem. “In a plot that could have come from an opera, males attempt to mate with the false females, but do not succeed. Until the new pheromone traps were pioneered by Exosect, a company with close links to Southampton University, moths were costing the Royal Opera House tens of thousands of pounds a year. The worst affected are ballet dancers’ costumes, which get engrained with sweat, clothes moths’ favourite taste.”
Master Builder
“The name of Arup rings through postwar architecture like a subsonic rumble. This extraordinary firm has had a largely invisible hand in many of the iconic structures of the past 50 years, from the Sydney Opera House through the Pompidou Centre, James Frazer Stirling’s Stuttgart Art Gallery, Norman Foster’s Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, right up to the Swiss Re Tower and the London Eye. If you’ve got a huge or difficult project to sort out, like a bridge or a skyscraper or an airport, Arup is one of the few companies to turn to.”
Why Are America’s School Textbooks So Bad?
“At least 21 states, including large and powerful California, Texas and Florida, have committees that decide which books can be used in public schools. The scrubbing and sanitizing that are imposed to satisfy the big states have affected all the commercially produced textbooks. That means that even states without adoption laws end up using the same books as the ones written to please California and Texas. Their decisions have been excoriated by spokespeople for both the right and the left. Their fear of offending any politically connected group means the textbooks they approve are often the dumbest and dullest of the bunch.”
Contemporary Art Market Tops Out?
Have prices for contemporary art peaked, after super-heating in recent months? Art Basel sales suggest they may be… “Younger art was making all the noise. Now, there’s a bit of a shift to postwar art. At these price levels, collectors are becoming more conservative.”
Chimp Paintings Sell For $25,000
An auction of paintings by Congo the chimpanzee have sold at auction in London for more than $25,000. “Congo, born in 1954, produced about 400 drawings and paintings between ages 2 and 4. He died in 1964 of tuberculosis. The three abstract, tempera paintings were auctioned at Bonhams in London alongside works by impressionist master Renoir and pop art provocateur Andy Warhol. But while Warhol’s and Renoir’s work didn’t sell, bidders lavished attention on Congo’s paintings.”
Power To (By) The People
“The nearly 1 billion people online worldwide — along with their shared knowledge, social contacts, online reputations, computing power, and more — are rapidly becoming a collective force of unprecedented power. For the first time in human history, mass cooperation across time and space is suddenly economical. ‘There’s a fundamental shift in power happening. Everywhere, people are getting together and, using the Internet, disrupting whatever activities they’re involved in’.”