“I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do,” Chuck Close told an NPR interviewer when Polaroid stopped making instant film in 2008. He wasn’t the only artist attached to the medium.
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From most angles, it looks like a bunch of lights flickering at random. But stand in just the right spot, and you’ll perceive moving bodies. Jim Campbell’s installation for Light Show – a new exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London – is a powerful antidote to the high-tech obsession with performance, the endless competition to pack more megapixels into a smaller screen or sensor. It also provides fresh insight into human vision.
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Opened in 1949, the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York is the world’s oldest museum dedicated to photography. It’s world renowned for its collection of more than 400,000 photos and negatives dating back to when the medium was first invented.
If you would like to check out some of the museum’s photos but can’t make the trip out to Rochester, there’s now a sleek new way for you to browse the imagery. The museum announced this week that it has become the first photo museum to join the Google Art Project.
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I’m Google is an interesting Tumblr blog started in 2011 by Baltimore-based artist Dina Kelberman. It’s a running blog collage comprising Google Image Search photographs and YouTube videos. Kelberman writes that the content is compiled into a “long stream-of-consciousness”: as you scroll down through the seemingly-never-ending flow of imagery, you’ll notice that the sections of similar images flow seamlessly from one to another based on form, composition, color, and theme.
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This strange looking vintage camera was created by Guangzhou Art Academy student Hu Shaoming, who spent four months disassembling two cameras from the 1930s and 1940s and rebuilding them with a zipper that reveals the inner mechanical components.
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William Eggleston didn’t invent color photography, but his landmark 1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art gave it dignity, and began the four-decade process of acceptance by curators and collectors as an art form to rival oil painting.
Shot in 1970, “Untitled (Memphis)” – shown above – was one of the 75 photos in the show, and also featured on the cover of the catalogue. Now it’s included in a retrospective of Eggleston’s early work at the Metropolitan.
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Who owns public art illegally placed onto private buildings? That’s a question that came up recently after a famous Banksy work in London was ripped out of the side of a building, shipped across the Atlantic, and put up for auction with an estimated final price of over half a million dollars.
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Los Angeles-based musician Paz Dylan recently pulled a pretty funny prank on the Grammy Museum in LA. He made a series of informational wall display pieces featuring strange descriptions and photographs of himself eating tacos, and then hung them up on the walls of the museum next to the real pieces. That’s pretty clever, but get this: no one noticed, and the pieces stayed up for a month.
The photograph above is a piece he made for the “Wall of Fame.”
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If you think about it, any digital photograph is simply a finite collection of pixels, with each one showing a specific color. There are also only a finite number of colors each pixel on a display can be. Thus, there are only a finite number of photographs that could possibly exist. An unfathomably large number, but finite nonetheless.
That’s the basic idea behind artist Jeffrey Thompson‘s Every Possible Photograph project. Thompson has created an installation that, given enough time, will generate every possible photograph by stepping through every possible combination of pixels.
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Since 2007, Jen Bekman’s 20×200 has become one of the leaders in the affordable art arena. Her business has printed and sold more than 200,000 collectible prints by more than 200 artists. ArtInfo writes that the affordable-yet-collectible photography market appears to be heating up:
[...] 20×200 founder Jen Bekman [...] works directly with artists, including established figures like William Wegman and Lawrence Weiner. She splits revenue with them down the middle after allowing for production costs, just as a traditional dealer would. On 20×200, prices range from $24 for an 8-by-10-inch print from an edition of 20 by an emerging artist to $10,000 for an 80-by-60-inch print by photographer Christian Chaize in an edition of two. “When I started, people were very skeptical about how selling a $24 print could be profitable,” Bekman recalls. “In fact a significant portion of our business—about 15 percent—comes from purchases over $500.” All told, Bekman has brought in approximately $15 million in cumulative revenue. Although several years in the red followed a profitable first year, 20×200 anticipates making a profit again in 2013.
Back in February, 20×200 sold $100,000 worth of photography by William Wegman — in a single day!
As the Battle for the Online Art World Sharpens, How the Players Are Adapting [ArtInfo via PotB]
