Culture Canvas

A roundup of the week’s arts and culture headlines.

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An exhaustive show of Leonardo da Vinci’s work at the National Gallery in London might be disrupted by strikes, via The Guardian. Workers at the museum are angry about cuts to security. In this photo, a woman admires da Vinci’s “The Lady with an Ermine.” Photo by Carl Court /AFP /Getty Images.

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Internet companies went on strike Wednesday to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act: and the Protect IP Act. The bill, aimed at curbing internet piracy, is angering critics who allege that the measures would amount to censorship. At Slate, Matthew Yglesias goes further, suggesting that the problem of piracy may not be that big of a problem after all.

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Iconic film company Kodak filed for bankruptcy Thursday, via the Associated Press. The 132-year-old company hasn’t had a profitable year since 2004.

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Fast Company examines rampant plagiarism amongst Amazon’s self-published e-books, many of them erotica.

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A quotation on the side of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall will be corrected. The project has been mired in controversy since its unveiling this fall, via CNN.

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The Golden Globes were held last weekend. The award for Best Picture went to The Descendants.

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The Tribeca Film Institute awarded a grant to a forthcoming biopic of artist Robert Mapplethorpe, via ARTINFO. James Franco is slated to play the influential photographer.

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YouTube announced that it’s hosting an online, short film competition, via The Guardian. It will send the winners to the Venice film festival. YouTube assembled last year’s Life in a Day by soliciting videos from its users.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art announced it will launch its own YouTube channel in July, MOCA TV. The museum will create contemporary art news programming, via The New York Times.

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While digital video has made independent filmmaking cheaper, archivists are worried about the shelf-life of digital movies, via Variety.

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As the chief curator at Seattle’s Frye Museum steps down — one of several notable departures at Seattle museums this year — Jen Graves of The Stranger asks, “Are museums supportive platforms from which to envision and enact social change?”

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In a messy twist, the producers of Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark counter-sued the play’s former director, Julie Taymor, via The Los Angeles Times.

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A year after mass protests toppled Hosni Mubarak from power, Egypt’s mainstream artists are looking for a foothold, via The Daily Beast.

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Writers Bloc, a group organized by Zadie Smith and other writers, sent novelists to report on international stories. Those reports are now available, via Guernica.

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Opera Boston closed its doors at the end of last year, and its internal disagreements are the subject of an exhaustive article in The Boston Globe.

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Dancer and choreographer Niles Ford died this week at the age of 52.

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Musical chameleon Jimmy Castor died this week at the age of 71.

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Ruth Fernandez, lauded as Puerto Rico’s premier singer, died this week at the age of 92. She also served for eight years in the Puerto Rican Senate.