Sophie Gamand, from “Wet Dog” portraits
- A “Wet Dog” portrait by Sophie Gamand has won the BBC’s portraiture award. More wet dogs on her site. [Sophie Gamand]
- The New Museum has announced that Google Glass will sponsor the 2015 Triennial, and the technology will be used with a custom “visitor engagement” app, which is hooked up to social media. No word yet as to how this might affect the art. [The New Museum]
- Modern Art Notes is on hiatus. No big surprise there—BlouinArtInfo has been hemorrhaging writers—but a bummer nonetheless. [Modern Art Notes]
- Further proof that the Knoedler scandal was not the work of a single painter, but was a pervasive industry problem. According to the Times, scholars were threatened with lawsuits, others were paid off, and not enough people asked questions. “In an industry whose transactions cry out for verification of both title to and authenticity of subject matter, it is deemed poor practice to probe into either,” wrote New York Supreme Court Judge J. Shorter. [New York Times]
- The New York Times uses Jack Flam, the president of the Dedalus Foundation (the foundation for Robert Motherwell’s estate), as their art historian source for the Knoedler story. Flam has been accused by Motherwell’s friend and art historian Dore Ashton of overstepping his executive role to take liberties with the catalogue raisonée, overpaying himself, and ousting the dissenters. [Bloomberg]
- One day, a poor engineer named Rob Rhinehart decided he could save money on food by heading to the internet, buying a bunch of amino acids, lipids, carbohydrates, sticking them in a blender, and using that concoction as a replacement for food. He named his magic mix, “Soylent” after the 1973 sci-fi film “Soylent Green” and after a Kickstarter that raised more $100k in two hours, he’s started a company. Is this the end of food? Rhinehart claims he’s never felt better. [The New Yorker]
- Lots of talk these days about Twitter’s problems, and they aren’t or are insurmountable. They announced last week that their active users increased by only 5.8 percent from the previous quarter. This particular take sees the bulk of their problems as marketing (and stagnation due to board infighting). [Stratechery]
- More evidence of widespread social media fatigue: this video about putting away your phone has gone viral. Since we watched it an hour ago, it’s already accumulated a million more views. [YouTube]
- Activist shareholder Daniel Loeb has landed himself a position on Sotheby’s board in a compromise deal. [Art Market Monitor]
- Apparently a lot of items going up for auction this week already have bidders. [The New York Times]
- Designer Matt Daniels has measured the number of unique words in rappers’ lyrics, and found that Outkast, Blackalicious, Ghostface Killah, and Wu Tang have all beaten Shakespeare in their invention of new words. [Matt Daniels]
