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Art: What's Original, Anyway?. An upcoming art exhibit teases the bounds of legality by incorporating copyright-protected images, sounds and words. Organizers timed it to coincide with a landmark Supreme Court copyright case. By Kendra Mayfield. [Wired News]

New Scientist: Skin-based networks that run at 10 Mbs may revolutionize P2P.   On a lighter note, imagine a party where people shared music and movies with physical contact. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

Art Treasures Shown, but Few Behold Them. Over a hundred artistic treasures from a Spanish province are on display at the cavernous Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, but the exhibition has received scant attention and small crowds.

Among the works in the ambulatory at the back of the cathedral at Amsterdam Avenue and West 112th Street are a remarkable painting of St. Sebastian by El Greco from the cathedral in Palencia; an unusual work by Goya from a convent in Valladolid; a painting by a noted Flemish artist from the tiny village of Castrojeriz; early examples of polychrome statues, richly enameled caskets, ivory statues and notable examples of Castilian art from the Romanesque to the Baroque. . . . By Celestine Bohlen. [New York Times: Arts]

Arts and Letters Daily, a wonderful and dense blog, has folded up its tent due to the bankruptcy of its parent company. A&L Daily will be auctioned off by the receivers. [Boing Boing Blog]

Prime Time Gets Real With a Plump Heroine. The sudden embrace of the Rubenesque seems to span all across popular culture, including a new ABC sitcom, "Less Than Perfect." By Alessandra Stanley. [New York Times: Arts]

In a Film Festival's Winners, a Focus on Artists at Work. Montreal's Le Festival International du Film sur l'Art will be offering film buffs a sort of on-screen tour of artist's studios and galleries around the world. By Joanne Latimer. [New York Times: Movies]

Japanese Masters Get Closer to the Toilet Nirvana. Toilets in Japan are far more than mere hygienic necessities: new models test biological samples, provide climate control and even soundtracks.

Japan's toilet wars started in February, when Matsushita engineers here unveiled a toilet seat equipped with electrodes that send a mild electric charge through the user's buttocks, yielding a digital measurement of body-fat ratio.

Unimpressed, engineers from a rival company, Inax, counterattacked in April with a toilet that glows in the dark and whirs up its lid after an infrared sensor detects a human being. When in use, the toilet plays any of six soundtracks, including chirping birds, rushing water, tinkling wind chimes, or the strumming of a traditional Japanese harp.

By James Brooke. [New York Times: International]

Richelieu, Politician as Connoisseur. "Richelieu: Art and Power," an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, is both original and provocative, panoramic and full of surprises. By John Russell. [New York Times: Arts]

Hieroglyphs in Guatemala tell of warfare between two superpowers that split much of the Maya civilization 1,500 years ago. By John Noble Wilford. [New York Times: International]

CNet. Western Digital's new hard-drive arrives at 200 Gigabytes. This is great:

Drive makers will surely need the new interface, as developments push areal densities to 100GB per platter. Such density could allow desktop drives to reach 400GB of storage by the end of next year.

It's too bad that overly-generous copyright laws prevent this capacity from being used. If copyright were at the Lessig threshold of five years, all manner of scenarios would be possible: a personal copy of the Library of Congress; archives of major newspapers, magazines, etc.; societal memory at your fingertips. Amazing. What value is that to our civilization?

To not fill this capacity (and unleash the creativity it could spawn) would be tantamount to the burning of the classical antiquity's Library of Alexandria. In a quest for power and control, a tyrant accidently destroyed one of the founts of knowledge in the ancient world.

Aren't we experiencing a similar power grab by corporate copyright holders for the same motives?

[John Robb's Radio Weblog]

Cooper Grey. A Flash file about Cooper Black, dammit · 11:12pm 26 July [Textism]