The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York said several images of the Prophet Mohammed were removed from a collection and are 'under review.'

After the cowardice of Yale University Press (not publishing the controversial Danish Mohammed cartoons in a book about the cartoon controversy), a cave-in by the Met would signal a truly depressing collapse of intellectual freedom. The original reporting for this story comes from the slightly sensational NY Post, so I hold out hope that Metropolitan Museum has not really bowed to fundamentalist pressure.

Photographer Preston Merchant has been traveling the world documenting the global diaspora of people from India. Indo-Carribean "Chutney Soca" music, South African "bunny chow," Manhattan Bhangra nights, and more.

The resulting book (forthcoming) should be fascinating.

(via Sree Sreenivasan on facebook)

We've been told repeatedly that the age of digital information would help people congregate around idiosyncratic interests, inspire producers to serve infinite niche markets, and make everybody more diversely and individualistically happy.

But what if the Internet age is making cultural consumers more herd-like? Is the world of online culture more homogenized than the offline environment? The analysis behind this graph would indicate that we are now less likely to purchase obscure niche products.

While each customer on average experiences more unique products in Internet World, the recommender system generates a correlation among the customers. To use a geographical analogy, in Internet World the customers see further, but they are all looking out from the same tall hilltop. In Offline World individual customers are standing on different, lower, hilltops. They may not see as far individually, but more of the ground is visible to someone. In Internet World, a lot of the ground cannot be seen by anyone because they are all standing on the same big hilltop.

... Here are Lorentz curves for Internet World (blue) and Offline World (green), in which the products are lined up in order of increasing popularity along the x axis, and the cumulative choices for those products is plotted up the Y axis.

Heavy on Hollywood and the arts... but no humanities fans?

President Obama is tapping some big names from Hollywood to serve on the President’s Committee on Arts and the Humanities.

Among the 25 members announced Monday by the White House were actors Edward Norton, Forest Whitaker, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kerry Washington and Alfre Woodard; CAA partner and managing director Bryan Lourd; independent film producer Liz Manne; and publicist Andy Spahn.

They join a committee that will include Vogue editor Anna Wintour, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and Teresa Heinz, a philanthropist and wife of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.

The President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities varies in importance from administration to administration. In the Reagan years, the PCAH was founded as a potential private-public alternative to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. Some presidents just appoint a few big donors and forget about it.

It may surprise some that the Bush administration ended up with a very active and effective PCAH. The committee members were major supporters (financially and morally) of the work of the federal cultural agencies (i.e., the NEH, NEA, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services). They also fostered unprecedented cooperation among the cultural agencies to promote domestic programs and international cultural exchange.

Today, President Obama named to the PCAH an impressive group of smart-seeming actors and other bold-faced names. Several of the actors, Kerry Washington in particular, are not averse to regular trips to Washington. Of actors who show an interest in politics, these are among the most informed and intelligent.

For purposes of the federal cultural agencies, however, I see two potential problems:

I wonder how much time and energy can these people spare for something as low-profile as the PCAH? I cannot imagine the likes of Anna Wintour showing up for more than one meeting amid the moldering plaster of Room 527 of the Old Post Office.

The biggest problem I see here is that, of twenty-five appointments, there are next to none from the worlds of museums, libraries, or the humanities.

By my reading of the full list of PCAH appointees there are only two with tenuous connections outside the arts: Victoria Strauss Kennedy, an "educational consultant for Loyola Marymount University" and Jill Cooper Udall, who "works with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian."

For all the struggles faced by the artists and arts organizations in a Great Recession, they bask in wealth and glamor compared to the libraries, museums, archives, non-fiction filmmakers, and other components of the "H" in "PCAH."  Will they get any attention at all from this Hollywood crowd?

I hope so.

1,000 True Fans

The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.

 

But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artist's works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales.

Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail?

Lots of interesting thoughts in this post, but there's still plenty of reason to be skeptical about the idea that there is a sustainable midpoint between anonymity and stardom. Food for thought, regardless.

[H/T Virginia Postrel]

So says Sasha Anawalt of the USC Annenberg Arts Journalism Program. I think this means there's a big opportunity for arts and culture critics and "curators." Somebody needs to help create and filter news and recommendations about the arts and culture (especially online).

This report, and a text version at the Fox News website, prompted a semi-baked response that I've published here at TheOccasional.org.

My bottom line:

Fox News and the National Taxpayers Union are wrong to be kicking around in the “decimal dust” of grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities in search of wasteful government spending.