Massive Links! Internets Edition

by Paddy Johnson on April 22, 2011 · 2 comments Massive Links

Jamie Beck's High Brow GIF

  • “New York photographer Jamie Beck has turned the GIF into a respected art form, presenting an interesting path for future use.” writes Rebecca Greenfield for The Atlantic. Yes, all those other GIFs were tacky and low brow, but now that this one looks like a video loop it’s “high art”.  A better criteria for evaluating the merit of a work would be to ask what this manipulation adds to the meaning of the original work. Instead, the established status of one medium is used to elevate another. I am reminded of a video “painting” spotted at the Pulse fair two years ago, which animated the eyes of its sitter. I hated that too. Link via: Tom Moody
    From the start, Bekman's motto for the business has been “Live With Art, It's Good For You,” which she knows can cause eye rolling among the culturati. “I feel like I have to defend it because it's such a pat, almost cheesy statement. But I really believe that people's lives are better because they have art around them,” she says. “I find it infuriating that art—which is such a joyful, emotional thing—is so fraught, that a lot of people have negative feelings around it. And some of it a mistrust of artists and the mistrust is: Are you trying to fool me?”
    Prospect Executive Director and former Senior Curator for The New Museum Dan Cameron has a similarly cheese-y statement on his facebook page:
    Art is the center of my life. I think art changes people, consciousness, and, ultimately, the world itself.
    I like him more for saying that too.

{ 2 comments }

Hyde April 22, 2011 at 5:51 pm

Thank god i’m not the only one thinking this about jamie beck…i thought i was taking crazy pills.

Rene Abythe April 27, 2011 at 12:10 pm

god bless tom moody

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