by Michael Anthony Farley on March 2, 2017

Mexican art museums post a lot of weird GIFs on their social media accounts.
I’ve noticed this because I’ve purged my Facebook newsfeed (in an attempt to de-stress from American political bickering) of everything except Spanish-language art pages. I highly recommend this strategy, if for no reason other than the constant stream of GIFs.
This one, for example, is from the Facebook of Museo Nacional de Arte INBA. What is going on here? We see the famed painter Doménikos Theotokópoulos (better known as “El Greco”) as an old-timey baseball player with contemporary sneakers and dragonfly wings. He’s barging in on “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” by Manet, and that painting’s famed nude seems bemusedly intrigued. He has three hands, presumably for his sword, baseball bat, and catcher’s mitt (just what position is he playing here?). I envy the art history students of the future who will get to study masterpieces like this.
Mostly, I’m hoping Jaimie Warren recreates this for her meme-inspired “Art History Series”.
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by Michael Anthony Farley on February 23, 2017

We snagged this GIF from Dezeen, because a standalone image it’s just so weird. A stoic woman in a bulky/futuristic outfit tears away packaging on her chest to unleash feathers and confetti. You’d think there’d be a really good story behind this one.
It turns out there are a lot of stories going on here, and I’m not sure any of them really make sense. The GIF is from Hussein Chalayan’s Autumn Winter 2017 show—a collection that’s somehow inspired by “universal personhood,” democracy, Greek folklore, and the “new, isolated individuals that the current world order is generating.”
The garments themselves kinda remind me of Star Trek: The Next Generation extras, which is a cultural point of reference that I guess communicates some of the above concepts? At any rate, I do like the idea of introverts wearing “IN CASE OF PARTY: BREAK GLASS” style tops full of glitter.
Or in the words of Chalayan:
“The Balkan era of Greek folk culture is used as a symbol of historical empowerment throughout the collection, connecting today’s sense of world citizenship to the ideals of personhood stemming from European Philhellenic sentiments of the early 19th century.”
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