When Stuff Becomes Art: The Protection of Contemporary Art Through the Elimination of VARA’s Public-Presentation Exception

The Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA) grants an artist the broad power to “prevent any intentional distortion, mutilation, or other modification of the work which would be prejudicial to [the artist’s] honor or reputation.” This right is significantly circumscribed, however, by VARA’s public-presentation exception, which states that a modification “which is the result . . . of the public presentation, including lighting and placement, of the work is not a destruction, distortion, mutilation, or other modification” that would otherwise violate VARA. This Note argues that the public-presentation exception is injudicious in light of the rise of the contemporary art movement. Much more than artists of earlier movements, contemporary artists rely on precise arrangement of elements and engagement with the physical space surrounding these elements in the creation of a work of art. Yet it is control over those critical contextual elements, arguably the most critical element of a contemporary work, that VARA explicitly denies to the contemporary artist. The public-presentation exception threatens more than just the personal interests of artists—a greater societal interest in preserving authentic cultural heritage for future generations is continually undermined as long as the public-presentation exception remains codified in VARA. Lasting protection of the integrity of works of contemporary art thus requires the elimination of the public-presentation exception

Suono e Spettacolo. Athanasius Kircher, un percorso nelle Immagini sonore.

The Society of Jesus made great propaganda efforts throughout the seventeenth century and chose the images and the play as a privileged means to communicate and persuade. Athanasius Kircher, a key figure of the seventeenth century, he decided to dominate the wild nature of sound through Phonurgia Nova, which includes a gallery of powerful symbolic images for Baroque aesthetics. The essay, through the grant of the images from the Library of the Department of Mathematics "Guido Castelnuovo" Sapienza University of Rome, aims to understand, through the pictures offered by Kircher, the sound phenomenon and the spectacle that this produces. In Phonurgia Nova a process of dramatization sound effects takes place, often through machines and "visions" applied to the theatrical reality, as experimental and astonishing environment beloved in baroque. Kircher illustrates the sound through explanatory figures, so to dominate the sound through the eyes. Sound is seen, admired and represented: its spectacle not only takes place through the implementation of sound machines or the "wonders" applied to the theater, but even through images, creating create a sense of wonder in in the erudite person of the seventeenth century

Analysis of European case-control studies suggests that common inherited variation in mitochondrial DNA is not involved in susceptibility to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

While some cases of familial ALS can be entirely attributed to known inherited variation, the majority (?90%) are sporadic, where the cause(s) are not entirely understood. Both genetic and environmental factors may contribute to susceptibility. Mitochondrial damage, a common feature of neurodegenerative disease, is observed in most patients and inherited polymorphism in the mitochondrial genome has been suggested as a contributing factor. We used an economic and efficient method to test whether such involvement is probable. We genotyped 22 mtDNA coding region SNPs and sequenced the mtDNA hypervariable region 1 to determine the position of each mitochondrial genome within the genealogy of mitochondrial haplotypes in samples of ALS patients (n =?700) and controls (n =?462) from two European populations. We compared haplotype and haplogroup distribution in cases and controls drawn from the same populations. No statistical difference was observed between cases and controls at either the haplogroup or haplotype level (p = ??0.2). In conclusion, it is unlikely that common, shared genetic variants in the mitochondrial genome contribute substantially to ALS. Combining the data with other studies will allow meta-analysis to look for variants with modest effect sizes. The sequencing of complete mitochondrial genomes will be required to assess the role of rare mutations

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