Nick Keyegan’s contribution to GIFbites
- Paddy Johnson writes about an animated GIF exhibition shown online and in Iran that has some real highs and lows. [Artnet]
- In today’s edition of word vomit, Vladimir Putin ends up making sexist remarks about Hillary Clinton. [Daily Intelligencer]
- Google Glass releases a $1,620 designer line by Diane von Fürstenburg. Yet again we are reminded that “Glass is a class divide on your face.” [Motherboard]
- This roundtable seeks to debunk the stereotype that contemporary Latin American art is all about geometric abstraction. [Collecion Cisneros]
- Job change! Curator Robin Nicholson leaves the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to direct the Pittsburgh Frick. [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]
- How do we create a market for digital artworks? We’d like to have a constructive discussion about this with the author of “From Mail Art to Tumblr.” The article supposes that online works are abstract manifestations: “What does it mean to own an artwork if the piece is not a self-contained object but rather an abstract manifestation?” writes author Willa Koerner. But what about the many websites, files, and code that are physically there? [Art21]
- At the ZMK Media Museum in Germany, visitors can now whisper into the disembodied, 3-D printed “ear” of Van Gogh. This strange artifact is partially replicated from the painter’s genome. [The New York Times]
- Manhattan art dealer Helly Nahmad is being charged with hiding a $13 million Modigliani stolen during World War II. The story has all the makings of a solid scandal: Money, an enigmatic, villainous corporation, and the Nazis. [The New York Post]
- A whirlwind trip through the art loot collected by the world’s richest financiers: “Bernie Madoff’s prized piece of office art was a four-foot sculpture of a screw that he frequently dusted off himself…A defense lawyer pleaded for the valued object to be photoshopped out of court documents.” [The Baffler]
- After two of his works were barred from being displayed in two separate Chinese cities this month, artist and dissonant Ai Weiwei writes an appeal to the Chinese government in Bloomberg: “Censorship has in effect neutered society, transforming it into a damaged, irrational and purposeless creature.” [Bloomberg View]
