Alt Wire is a digest of spoon-fed inspiration curated by our favorite editors, journalists, artists, and visionaries. Today's guest is indie publisher and Utne visionary Richard Nash.

Richard Nash Alt Wire crop Object Desire: The Victoria and Albert Museum in London now has an online visual catalog of more than a million of the items in its collection of material artifacts -- clothing, furniture, shoes, toys, photographs, design drawings, textiles, coins, religious artifacts, and many other types of objects. Some object records include multiple photographs, and all include fairly robust cataloging information, including details about the biographies of designers and other in-depth information.

A Temporary Monopoly on Expression: These two links deal with a topic about which I think I might be more passionate, intellectual property. A terrible misnomer term in fact, as copyright and trademark isn't even property, but rather a temporary monopoly on expression granted by government. OK, it can be argued that property itself is also that, but let's not go there. Anyhow, American's leading copyright lawyer, Bill Patry recently gave a speech on the origins of copyright law, and the controversies of recent years surrounding it. For many artists though, they tune out one more lawyer trying to tell them their work isn't quite as theirs as they think it is, so the other link on this topic is to Jonathan Lethem's "The Ecstasy of Influence," a seminal essay by a novelist seeking to illustrate his (ecstatic) dependence on the culture he's soaked in.

Embrace the Middlebrow: Ex-Utne dude Josh Glenn has joined forces with critic/scholar-at-large Matthew Battles to create HiLoBrow... for, as they aver, middlebrow is not the solution. You'll not find a simple "What is Middlebrow" page here, as Josh is still working on his manifesto, so I'm forced to offer Wikipedia's definition: "The term middlebrow is used to describe both a certain type of easily accessible art, usually literature, as well as the population which uses art to acquire culture and class that is usually unattainable." Whatever you think of the premise, the outcome is unarguably fab: In the last few days alone they've featured Lynn Peril on Robert Mapplethorpe and Ti-Grace Atkinson, Jason Grote on Sam Shepard, Patrick Cates on on Screaming Lord Sutch, and Luc Sante on Hans Magnus Enzensberger.

The Obligatory Meme: And, finally, because every set of five favorite links needs to contain at least one cute, user-generated-content, ironic-yet-oddly-sweet internet meme: My Parents Were Awesome.

Bio: Richard Nash is an independent publishing consultant and entrepreneur, presently developing a start-up portfolio of social publishing communities and imprints. For most of the past decade, he ran the iconic indie Soft Skull Press. He is a 2009 Utne Readervisionary .