Author: Shawn K. Quinn

The Met and its “recommended” admission fees

As recently featured in the Huffington Post and NPR’s The Two-Way blog, there has surfaced a controversy and lawsuit about the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s $25 admission fee. The controversy stems from the fact the $25 is actually a recommended donation for admission pursuant to an amendment to an agreement between the city and the museum’s owners in 1970. Those who wish to get into the Met still have to pay something, even if only a penny. (The original 1893 agreement, prior to the 1970 amendment, required free admission for at least five days and two evenings per week in exchange for grants and free use of the land.)

ArtInfo has an interesting article from 2011 which, interestingly, was written right before the increase from $20 to $25 in the suggested/recommended admission fee. From that article comes this dandy quote:

According to the New York Times, Met director Thomas P. Campbell is justifying this cruel cost bump with the argument that post economic-downturn, visitors have been proffering less and less. Apparently, while in boomtimes the per capita contribution goes up annually, in the past fiscal year it’s plummeted a whole 16 cents. So, yes, people are paying less, and your plan is to raise the price — brilliant idea!

I support pay-as-you-can admission fees on principle. They help bring visual and performing arts to an audience which might otherwise just stay home watching cookie-cutter broadcast TV. And society needs more art and more people exposed to art. On the flip side of it, trying to pass off the $25 recommended donation for admission as a requirement is a bit underhanded and could even be seen as thinly-disguised greed, certainly not something that our museums should be doing whether in New York City or elsewhere. I think that is the crux of the lawsuit, and while in general it’s bad form to sue a non-profit, others have opined that the Met isn’t hurting for money.

As examples, see the Met’s online ticketing page and the Met’s guest passes page. There is no “recommended” about the $25 (or discounted amounts of $17 for seniors or $12 for students) at either page. The only way to get a guest pass for less than $25, is to get ten or more for $20 each (total payment: $200+). This would appear to go against the spirit of the 1970 amended agreement between the museum and the city (though the online ticketing page does have a disclaimer if you look in the often-ignored legalese at the bottom).

At the same time, I recognize that it’s unrealistic to expect free admission to the Met. This is not at all what I am suggesting. Locally, we have free admission at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, for one night per week underwritten by a corporate sponsor. I appreciate this, and I recognize that it requires quite a bit of money to do something like it.

Looking at the big picture, it’s possible that the Met just doesn’t like the agreement they are stuck in any more. If that’s truly the case, then it should be renegotiated. But, meanwhile, the agreement with the city should be honored both in letter and in spirit, and the fact you can get in for less than the recommended donation should be made clearer—not buried in legalese.

To publish or not to publish a clearly bigoted rant?

If you’re easily offended by racist slurs, you might want to skip this post, or at least the article I’ve linked to.

A recent Addicting Info article details a recent incident in the Lincoln Journal (Lincoln County, West Virginia). The paper ran a transcribed voicemail rant, complete with uncensored racist and homophobic slurs (which are blacked out in the illustration). Suffice it to say that it contains a pretty broad cross section of slurs, that I would only assume describe most of the non-white, non-straight population of Lincoln County. From the article:

The paper’s Managing Editor, Sean O’Donoghue, says that, as a Roman Catholic, he is offended by the rant. Further, many residents were disgusted. However, the paper is defending the decision to print the rant, saying that it is in reference to a local story about a local gay teacher who was recently terminated, which has recently been the top story.

However, the question is, should a paper, regardless of reasoning, publish something like this?

This is a situation I’ve grappled with on many occasions right here on this very blog. I’ve erred most often on the side of publishing my post, sometimes with warnings. But a hobbyist blog with relatively low readership and an area’s major print newspaper are two completely different animals.

The Addicting Info article goes on to say the Lincoln Journal should not have published this, or at least should have published a retraction. The rationale is that this is blatant hate speech. I can see their point of view, however, as much as I abhor racism and fascism, I feel there’s something to be said for publishing something like this occasionally (once every two or three years). There certainly should have been at minimum a prominent disclaimer and an advance apology for offending anyone, once the decision was made to publish.

My rationale: Every once in a while, it’s easy to ignore these types of people and pretend they don’t exist. I believe shining a spotlight on them once in a while helps the rest of decent society realize that we still have a racism and bigotry problem on this planet.

I share the dream of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and I hope that we can realize that dream as a society within my lifetime. But it is important to realize ignoring racism does not always make it go away.

(Footnote: I refer to “the late” Dr. King because even though his death was, at the time of writing, mere days short of four and a half decades ago, I believe his natural life would have extended through at least the next couple of years. That, and it was only in 2011 August that the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial was opened.)

A big fat Greek soccer and racism controversy

Okay, I’ve got a couple of posts here that will probably wind up being posted in relatively quick succession. Both deal with similar topics (racism), but are completely different situations. This is the first of two.

The BBC reported on a Greek soccer player, Giorgos Katidis, who got in trouble for a Nazi salute. Giorgos has been banned from playing for the Greek national soccer team, and suspended from his professional soccer club.

This commentary post on backpagefootball.com takes a pretty critical angle towards Giorgos, who claims that he is not a facist at all, had no idea what a Nazi salute was, and claims he was simply pointing towards a friend in the stands. Further down, that article goes into further detail on Golden Dawn and the bad blood between soccer fans in both Albania and Greece and why this is an even bigger deal than it otherwise would be.

I believe most of what Giorgos is saying, but it is difficult for me to believe the bit about pointing. Usually, one does not point with the whole hand oriented in a salute position, one would point with one finger outstretched (specifically, the index finger).

I’d like to think Giorgos is telling the truth about not knowing what a Nazi salute is. It’s difficult to believe, but it’s still technically possible. Certainly, now he knows and won’t do it again.

I hate fascism and I agree in principle that there’s no place for it in professional sports anywhere. But I think the accused has a right to be heard and explain himself as well. I don’t like that backpagefootball.com uses the headline “ignorance is no excuse” (I’m linking to them because it’s the only commentary I could readily find).

An attack on video gamers in the wake of Sandy Hook

I’ve weighed in on this topic before, but this is a different angle that more directly affects me. Specifically, the kind of thinking I have found out about most recently is extremely flawed, and dangerous to video gamers everywhere if allowed to become a mainstream point of view.

A recent Salon.com article entitled “‘Gamers’ are not the enemy” by Andrew Leonard takes a highly critical look at a recent report on the Sandy Hook shooter by New York Daily News reporter Mike Lupica. As summarized by Andrew’s article, Mr. Lupica calls a spreadsheet of past mass murders found in the house where the shooter was living a “score sheet” and makes the jump that it was the shooter’s goal to put a new “high score” on that list.

Andrew fights back in his post, with the facts. Such as this gem:

According to the CDC, “Homicide rates for males, ages 10 to 24 years, declined from 25.7 per 100,000 population in 1991 to 15.3 per 100,000 in 2007.” Now there are surely factors influencing that drop that have nothing to do with video games, but judging from that one statistic alone, logic would dictate the conclusion that playing video games has been beneficial to society instead of the reverse. Certainly, a massive increase in hours spent video gaming has not resulted in a rising murder rate.

I will add that if there’s any logic to the view that video games fuel violence, there should have been a steep drop in homicide rates in 1983, and maybe 1984, 1985, and 1986 as well (due to the video game market crash of 1983) that picked right back up again in about, say, 1985. I haven’t looked, but I doubt either any drop in homicide rates from 1982 to 1983 or any rise in homicide rates in any later years prior to about 1990 are anywhere near as sharp as needed to give any credibility to this theory.

Even if the bit about this being a “score sheet” is true, the vast majority of video gamers don’t engage in this type of behavior, and it is more indicative of other mental illness(es) which don’t have anything to do with the fact the shooter was a heavy video game player. To blame the video games on this is incredibly short-sighted and smacks of a flimsy excuse to severely cripple (or possibly kill off outright) an entertainment medium which is still relatively young.

It is far more relevant that the shooter had such easy access to firearms. Of note, the shooter did not actually own these firearms, his parents were the registered owners. These are facts conveniently left out of the campaign for gun control laws–no amount of background checks would have kept a shooter in a similar situation from getting access to the guns!

It goes back to how we take care of the mentally ill in this society, and the stigma we have placed on mental illness as a society. These are the problems we need to solve if we want to keep another Sandy Hook, another Columbine, another Bath from happening. We won’t fix them by doing a hatchet job on video games, and we won’t fix them by castrating the Second Amendment.

AT&T’s blame game: the Andrew Aurenheimer case

I haven’t been following the Andrew Aurenheimer case as closely as I perhaps should have.

But recently I read VentureBeat’s story of the night before and Rolling Stone’s story of the sentencing. And I find this case more than a bit unsettling.

Andrew’s alleged “crime” for which he will serve 41 months in Federal prison stems from a just plain boneheaded lapse in security on the part of AT&T, which Andrew was trying to get closed.

From the VentureBeat story:

During the summer of 2010, Auernheimer and co-defendant Danile
Spitler discovered that by querying AT&T’s iPad servers with a string of numbers that matched subscribers’ SIM card identifiers, AT&T’s servers would send back the unencrypted, unprotected email address of the AT&T customer, the iPad owner. AT&T had a massive security design flaw, which, as it admitted in Auernheimer’s one-week trial, was intentional: for subscriber convenience. After running the script to capture 114,000 email addresses of AT&T iPad subscribers, Auernheimer sent a list of the email addresses to Gawker to highlight the security hole. Gawker then printed them in redacted form.

Later in the VentureBeat story:

“We sent [HTTP] Get requests to a public API,” Auernheimer says. “They charged me with unauthorized access to a computerized device … and identity theft, which is a possession charge … if you walk down a street and write down physical addresses, you’re stealing identifiers, and you’re an identify thief.”

If you’re reading this, and thinking “this is just plain ludicrous” you’re not alone. If anyone should be prosecuted in a criminal court, it’s an AT&T employee for letting this happen. “Subscriber convenience” is an extremely poor excuse for this kind of thing.

The VentureBeat article goes into much more detail, which I’m not going to quote, on the implications. It would be one thing if Andrew had an AT&T employee’s password or similar access control information and got the 114,000 email addresses that way. But what Andrew’s trial sets as precedent is that any one of us could, in theory, be arrested just on the whims of the owner of an Internet-connected computer for what is perceived as “unauthorized access”.

It’s extremely difficult if not outright impossible to have a blog like this one for over four years, and throughout that entire time, completely avoid talking about someone who would rather not be talked about in a given context or even at all. In fact I know I’ve done this at least twice on this blog (probably more than that, but twice that I can easily remember). Based on this, if I access someone’s blog who doesn’t want me talking about them, to quote what they are saying, it can be labeled “unauthorized access”. And I could, in theory, be subject to the same 10 years in prison Andrew was facing, for accessing a public blog entry, the same way AT&T accidentally made public its subscriber info which it should not have. And so could anyone else, in theory. All they would need is a prosecutor willing to go along.

The EFF is leading the charge to reform the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act), the law under which Andrew was prosecuted. If you can help the EFF, please do so. I hope Andrew wins his appeal. Because if the court system is about justice, then the court system really failed us here, because this is quite emphatically not justice.