By JEFF ZELENY and JIM RUTENBERG Accessed @ www.nytimes.com
"...for all of the anticipation, and with less than five weeks remaining until Election Day, the 90-minute debate unfolded much like a seminar by a business consultant and a college professor. Both men argued that their policies would improve the lives of the middle class, but their discussion often dipped deep into the weeds, and they talked over each other without connecting their ideas to voters."
Art Databases: Goya & Rembrandt
"The Museo del Prado in Madrid has just launched a Web site, Goya en el Prado, which makes over 1,000 works by the late 18th- and early 19th-century Spanish master available for online viewing, along with his correspondence and other documents....
"Two venerable Dutch art institutions–the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD) and the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis have joined forces to create The Rembrandt Database, a resource that brings together materials from research institutions around the world, including the National Gallery of London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art." Accessed @ www.openculture.com
AMANDA PALMER’S ACCIDENTAL EXPERIMENT WITH REAL COMMUNISM
By Joshua Clover Accessed @ The New Yorker Online
"Amanda Palmer, the singer who raised a spectacular sum on Kickstarter to fund her new solo album and then asked for volunteers to play with her for no pay when she went on tour with her band, Grand Theft Orchestra, a few months later, is the Internet’s villain of the month.* ... Beneath that, however, is an interesting set of problems about art and work in an age when the mechanisms for valuing them have broken down....
"...What happens to art, be it Amanda Palmer’s or Azealia Banks’s (or Thomas Pynchon’s or Kathryn Bigelow’s), when people can get it for free without facing arrest? Or, to put it more starkly, what is the fate of art after private property is done away with? Will people keep making it? Will they keep reproducing, marketing, and distributing it?
"...Workers must be paid enough to buy life’s necessaries; if they didn’t need a wage to acquire such things, they would hardly show up. Amanda Palmer’s cynical scheme, behind its own back, offers an anything-but-cynical vision: art supported by interested communities, workers who can show up for some reason other than pure need. The whole affair resembles an accidental experiment with real communism."
How Mitt Romney’s Luck Ran Out
More recently, however, Romney’s luck has turned. His campaign has been star-crossed, veering from one minor disaster to another. The latest example is the emergence of Romney’s covertly recorded observation at a Florida fundraiser that the 47% of Americans who pay no federal income taxes will never vote for him because they “believe they are victims” entitled to endless government support and, by the way, will never “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” Not to generalize or anything. This, just days after Romney’s rash statement late on the night of Sept. 11 suggesting that the Obama Administration sympathized with the violent mobs in Cairo and Benghazi. (This Pew poll tells the story of how that went over.)
