I am not quite sure how academic this has to be, so I’m going to choose to make this informal until my professor gets on me about it.
I read this article, “‘The Most Expensive GIF of All Time’ Is Being Sold For $5,800,”an Atlantic article written by Megan Garber, and was told to respond to it. I think it’s appropriate to start out with this quote that may or may not be a Warhol quote- I say may or may not because I saw this on a poster in a poster shop and this quote was credited to Warhol but since when were posters in poster shops the epitome of factual information? Anyways, the quote is something like “art is what you can get away with,” (maybe said by Andy Warhol), and this article embodies that perfectly.
For one, let’s unpack the actual content. I’m gonna paraphrase it horribly, but there’s this balloon dog piece that sold for 58.4 million by Jeff Koons, and this dude Michael Green decided to make a bunch of digital images of it, mash it together into a gif, and then put it on ebay to sell. It didn’t get bid on, so he then pulled an (unsuccessful) Damien Hirst on everybody and raised the price on this gif to $5,800. To nobody’s surprise it didn’t sell.
I’m a little bit disappointed, just because I feel like it should have sold. It reminds me of hypebeast culture, or just upper class ‘I-use-my-mom’s-credit-card-for-lululemon’ type people, you know? There are people out there who would buy it just to say that they did. And then if somebody did buy it that would make hypothetical Warhol proud, because the great success in Green’s work wouldn’t come from the gif itself, it would come from the fact that he got away with selling it for almost $6,000.
(in order: Koons' sculpture, a picture of the gif, For The Love of God by Damien Hirst, Warhol portrait, Damien Hirst)
Comments