Paddy Johnson and Whitney Kimball

• The final segment in Paddy Johnson’s four part animated GIF history is live. In this section she covers the major GIF events and exhibitions of 2011-2014. [Artnet]
• Designing innovative quirky crap is not good for the world unless it’s innovating sustainably. We’re looking at you, Gizmodo, Design Boom, Maker Blog, Motherboard. [Medium]
• Benjamin Sutton has published a truly fantastic interview with Culture Commissioner Tom Finkelpearl. “Art is good for communities” he tells Sutton in a passionate monologue on the importance of art to the city. [Artnet]
• Pet cats are responsible for around 3 billion bird deaths a year, around 10,000 times as many deaths as wind turbines. [TreeHugger]
• Art Basel has sent the following email to warn their clients of a new scam:

“Dear Gallery,

I write today to inform you of an online fraud, based upon information conveyed to us by six of our exhibiting galleries in the last few days. By sharing this information, we want to protect you from such criminal activities. Over the past three weeks galleries have been contacted by a man who is calling himself Mr. Steve Black, claiming to live at 40 Lavender Gardens, Battersea, London SW11 1DJ, his email is: sb47868@gamil.com.

Mr. Black has contacted these galleries through the online catalog at the Art Basel web page and requested information on the gallery and available works. He appears to buy one or several works from jpg images sent to him, unusual for someone who appears to have no understanding about the gallery and the artist at the time of the initial contact. Mr. Black then requests an invoice and sends a check with an amount much higher than the invoice. He next tries to make the gallery believe that he accidentally overpaid, and asks for an immediate refund by wire transfer of the overpaid sum. Yet the checks he sent, we were told, turned out to be fake and will not be cashed by the gallery’s bank.

We hope that the distribution of this information will prevent any further harm to our galleries. While we have already heard of six such cases, we ask you to also be alert for possible new names and new identities using a similar scam. Please let me know if you have any questions or have had similar experiences in recent times.” [The Baer Faxt]

• A juicy email exchange between an unidentified collector looking to purchase work and an unidentified dealer refusing to sell. Based on the existing collection presented, the dealer seemed fearful of flipping. He manages to tell the collector this, though, in a rather unkind manner. Also, what a fucking luxury to be able to decline sales in this way. [The Art Market Monitor]
• Arts Council England is discussing the institution of a special hour in museums when visitors are not allowed to take pictures. Arts Council National Chair Sir Peter Bazalgette compared the hour to spending time in the quiet car on the train. [Hyperallergic]
• Oliver Wainwright compares property developers to out-of-control banks who are wreaking havoc on culture and communities the world over. The difference, though, is that we have to live inside this problem. “The more we build, the more our cities are emptied, producing dead swathes of zombie town where the lights might never even be switched on,” he writes. “What we are making now, we will all have to live with for a very long time.” [The Guardian]
• Pushbacks continue on the Frank Gehry-designed Eisenhower Memorial, a “five-star folly”. [New York Times]
• The MacArthur Awards have been announced. Rick Lowe, an artist who, with the help of other artists, has spent years revitalizing 22 project row houses built in 1930 as tenant shacks. [The New York Times]