Image Credit: thenextweb.com
- How to be a DIY cyborg, from 2013. [Slate]
- Gagosian Gallery is now representing the estate of Nam June Paik. The representation was initiated by its Hong Kong gallery staff, and will coincide with a fall exhibition there focusing on his later works. The move is obviously a huge blow to James Cohan Gallery, who originally represented the video art pioneer. [Art Newspaper]
- On the Alphabetization of Google from a venture capitalist: “The way I see it, Google is the cash cow that finances all the big bets Larry and Sergey are making inside Alphabet…For $445bn, you get $70bn of cash, Google, which does $70bn of revenue and produces $20bn of operating cash flow (probably more now that is it not going to burdened by all of these other investments), and all of these big bets, including Google Ventures and Google Capital, which are about the biggest investors in the VC sector right now.” [AVC]
- A newly-released security camera tape might hold clues to the case of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, the largest art theft in American history. In 1990, a security guard let men dressed as police officers into the museum, who then bound him and his colleague in duct tape and made off with $500 million in paintings by the likes of Vermeer and Rembrandt. Sadly, many of artworks were cut from their frames during the heist—damaging them irreparably. [Live Science]
- How on earth can you publish a discussion on why typing “haha” is for the olds and “hehehe” and “heh” are for the youngs, and without mention of the biggest “heh”-types of all, Beavis and Butthead? [The New Yorker]
- For those rueful about start-up culture’s legacy of inflated fake job-titles, this etymological history of the term “rock star” reveals how the downward spiral began with boomer rock stars becoming corporate shills on the 1980s comeback concert circuit and then ended with the 28K-earning social-media rock star. [New York Times Magazine]
- Amy Goodman interviewed Anne Pasternak and Nato Thompson, chief curator of Creative Time, about the organization’s democracy-centric summit at the Venice Biennale. [Democracy Now!]
- There’s been a surge of censorship in the UK. Art exhibitions and theatrical productions that could strain ethnic tensions have been repeatedly cancelled or relocated due to police concerns that they could incite violence. [The Guardian]
- Kanye West’s new adidas sneaker won’t be released until August 22, but here’s a list of all the shops in the entire human world that carry it. It also looks like a goth grandma knitted a shoe off a plumbing pipe. [HUH.]
- New trend on YouTube: creating frames for the TV show you uploaded. Here’s Garfield and Friends, as seen within a Garfield-theme frame. [YouTube]
- Venice Biennale 2015 Artist Trading Cards. Collect them all! [Biennial Project]
- Melissa Chiu, the director of the Smithsonian’s Hirschhorn Museum, has come under fire for igniting a seemingly one-sided N.Y./D.C. rivalry. Offenses include appointing New York-based Gianni Jetzer as the museum’s curator at large and throwing the museum’s 40th anniversary party in Manhattan, instead of the District. [Washington City Paper]
- Still need a vacay, people with money to spare? New York nonprofit Art in General is accepting slots for a $2,500 tour of Detroit in October. Price includes hotel, meals, but no airfare. [Art in General]
