The Art Gallery of Ontario, fresh off a disastrous series of press previews that banned photography of the new architecture being previewed, has now gone so far as to use its blog to lie to the public about its rights to photograph artworks.

The gallery will now graciously and generously “allow” you to photograph a staircase, but

[t]he relaxed policy on photographs cannot, however, extend to gallery spaces where artworks are installed, primarily due to copyright restrictions. While our visitors often point out that some other major art museums in the world allow photography of artwork, many of those collections are no longer subject to copyright restrictions, or are under different copyright rules than those in Canada.  We didn’t set the copyright rules but we are required to respect them. 

It is perfectly permissible to photograph copyrighted works, including artworks, for a number of purposes, including the five enumerated purposes of fair dealing (research or private study, criticism or review, and news reporting).

A staircase isn’t a copyrighted object or even a copyrightable object. We can photograph it all we want under copyright law, since such law has nothing to do with taking pictures of it. Meanwhile, while copyright law protects artists, it also protects photographers.

The authoress of the posting, Susan Bloch-Nevitte, needs to stop making such a big deal about “listening” to the public and start making more of a big deal about not lying to the public. There is no legal basis, at all, on which to ban photography of AGO’s collected artworks. It’s true the AGO is “required to respect” copyright law (it isn’t just a set of “rules”), and that means it cannot ban practices that amount to fair dealing.

We went through this already with OCA.

Lauren Collins, “Brown Baggers,” Nouveau-Yorkais, 2008.12.22–29:

Ron Raznick, the president of RTR Packaging, in the Flatiron district, which has for twenty years made shopping bags for such clients as Takashimaya, Ron Herman, and W Hotels, has noticed the vogue for discreet packaging. He is calling it “inconspicuous chic.” He has not experienced a decline in business owing to the recession, he said, the other day over the phone, but people are choosing “more classical stuff”: Embossing, UV coding, thick stock.

No, that’s UV coating, as in coating that increases resistance to light. It isn’t a code printed in ultraviolet. (“Coating” and “coding” rhyme in most dialects of American English. The troublesome consonant is a flap [ɾ], not “a D.”)

So there you have it: an error in the New Yorker. (Lauren Collins wrote in later to say I wasn’t the first one to point it out. I see!) Where was Michael J. Fox’s chief verificationist that day?

My article for the Web Directions house organ, Scroll, is now available online. “Unreadable” asks the question: Has the Web rewired our brains so we are now unable to read long?

Obviously yes.

Incidentally, I “read” 250 books last year. I am trying to write more books.

Ultraglamorous city infrastructure on the jewel in Toronto’s crown, ouest ave. St. Clair Ave. West.

I have 1,500 “classic” RSS subscriptions and 75 podcast subscriptions. Only a fraction of those regularly update themselves. Today I wish to gripe about poor implementation of two podcasts.

1. Tiësto’s Club Life

   Or Tiësto’s Club Lifé, as I always read it. Tiësto is the acceptable face of dance music, the perfect middle-of-the-road DJ. Tiësto’s value proposition is dance music that is always in good contemporary taste – no old disco and nothing insane like happy hardcore. He, and it, are easy to like.

   His weekly podcast seems to have everything – chapter markers; custom artwork for each chapter; just exactly enough superminimalist introduction and foreground narration (in an accent that, true to Dutch form, suggests Tiësto thinks his English is better than it is). I listen to it, at low volume, while reading on the subway. It’s great for that usage.

   What’s wrong? Every podcast comes in under the name Radio 538: Tiësto`s club life podcast.

   • They can manage a diæresis on an e but they can’t manage an apostrophe – again, the Dutch mangle the English language and see right through it. The obvious explanation – they’re using some weird Vlaams keyboard that doesn’t have an apostrophe – is meaningless, as apostrophes are always typable on Western-language keyboards, you can copy and paste an apostrophe from somewhere else, and, crucially, RSS is XML and you can just use a character entity. They even manage a neutral apostrophe on the homepage. I’ve repoted this repeatedly, to no avail.
   • I don’t care what Radio 538 is. I have to search my list of podcasts every week just because it isn’t listed under T.

   The podcast exacts its own price through the opening theme music – a shockingly loud, screeching, dissonant sound effect that nobody, whatsoever, could possibly like.

   The opening sting is so painful and such a deterrent that I have set up an elaborate avoidance mechanism: I run some other piece of audio first, turn the volume down to next to nothing, start up Tiësto, and instantly jump to the next chapter. I have now done this for 92 consecutive podcasts. When I sink into your upholstered armchair, I don’t expect to sit on a thumbtack the size of a traffic cone.

2. Monocle Weekly

   Not exactly as boring as Monocle (op. cit.; I have since recycled all my issues). Not an outright joke like the original video podcast – a dull, ill-narrated screencast redolent of 1970s British travelogues, an unfunny parody of Boring Postcards. This new weekly podcast, hosted initially by Tyler Brûlé –

   

   Perverse FANTASTIC MAN orthography: Mr. TYLER BRÛLÉ

   – merely shows a lack of finesse that would never be tolerated in the context of the print magazine’s overdetermined design and structure.

   • No custom artwork.
   • No chapter stops, again without custom artwork.
   • Name of podcast needlessly duplicated in episode-title field.
   • Giant unreadable slab of text in the description field.

   They already have FANTASTIC MAN–style B&W still photos of Mr. BRÛLÉ at work in the studio (with visible custom Monocle mikeflash), and of all guests; such photos are easily shot during each recording. The rest is basic housekeeping.

   UPDATE (2009.01.17): Mr. Brûlé’s minions managed to write the name of the podcast as “The Monocle Weely” on two of the four episodes issued to date.

Now, what odds do you give that any of these deficiencies will be fixed?