“Sino-foreign joint ventures, Sino-foreign cooperative ventures, and foreign business units shall not engage in online publishing services,”
This could shut news outlets, publishers, gaming companies, information providers, and entertainment companies out of China.
Source: Beijing is banning all foreign media from publishing online in China — Quartz
In the digital economy, it was supposed to be impossible to make money by making art. Instead, creative careers are thriving — but in complicated and unexpected ways.
Source: The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t – The New York Times
Defining common cultural literacy for an increasingly diverse nation
A generation of hindsight now enables Americans to see that it is indeed necessary for a nation as far-flung and entropic as the United States, one where rising economic inequality begets worsening civic inequality, to cultivate continuously a shared cultural core. A vocabulary. A set of shared referents and symbols.
parents on both left and right have come to accept recent research that shows that the more spoken words an infant or toddler hears, the more rapidly she will learn and advance in school. Volume and variety matter. And what is true about the vocabulary of spoken or written English is also true, one fractal scale up, about the vocabulary of American culture.
Just because an endeavor requires fluency in the past does not make it worshipful of tradition or hostile to change.
…
radicalism is made more powerful when garbed in traditionalism. As Hirsch put it: “To be conservative in the means of communication is the road to effectiveness in modern life, in whatever direction one wishes to be effective.”
The more serious challenge, for Americans new and old, is to make a common culture that’s greater than the sum of our increasingly diverse parts. It’s not enough for the United States to be a neutral zone where a million little niches of identity might flourish; in order to make our diversity a true asset, Americans need those niches to be able to share a vocabulary. Americans need to be able to have a broad base of common knowledge so that diversity can be most fully activated.
Source: E.D. Hirsch Jr.’s ‘Cultural Literacy’ in the 21st Century – The Atlantic
In major museums around the world, great works of art are hidden away from public view. What are they – and why can’t we see them?
the Tate shows about 20% of its permanent collection. The Louvre shows 8%, the Guggenheim a lowly 3% and the Berlinische Galerie – a Berlin museum whose mandate is to show, preserve and collect art made in the city – 2% of its holdings.
“We don’t have the space to show more,” says Berlinische Galerie director Thomas Köhler, explaining that the museum has 1,200 sq m in which to display works acquired over decades through purchases and donations.
A spatial deficit is only one reason why not. Another is fashion: some holdings no longer fit their institutions’ curatorial missions.
After a maximum of three months, Young Hare needs five years in dark storage with a humidity level of less than 50% for the paper to adequately rest.
Tim Jenison, a Texas-based inventor, attempts to solve one of the greatest mysteries in the art world: How did Dutch master Johannes Vermeer manage to paint so photo-realistically 150 years before the invention of photography? Here’s how he conducted his experiment.
Source: Vermeer’s paintings might be 350 year-old color photographs / Boing Boing
Tim’s Vermeer Blu-Ray edition trailer – YouTube