This article brought up many interesting avenues of thought that I hadn’t completely considered before. I had always thought of gifs as clips from pieces of popular culture that are used to carry a conversation over text. I had never really thought of it as an art form.
Now that I’ve started to think of gifs in this different way though, I totally agree that they are a valid art form. Digital art comes in many different shapes and sizes, including photographic manipulation and even video editing. In my opinion, a gif is somewhere in between the two forms. In a way, it’s like a mini animation, which is inarguably an officially recognized art form.
As for Michael Green’s gif, I would certainly consider that to be “real art.” Maybe even more real than Jeff Koons’s original piece, knowing the story behind it of having others build it for him. In many of my art classes that I’ve taken so far, a recurring lesson has been how remixing others’ media can help develop your own unique artistic voice. Personally, I think that Green’s take on the balloon animal is a much more creative product.
While I do now see gifs as a form of digital media and not just conversational additions, I still have mixed feelings about paying to own them. This uncertainty comes from what I’ve seen about NFTs in recent months. From what I understand, in order to constantly power NFTs, it takes a toll on the health of the environment. In that case, I think it would be better suited to treat digital art such as gifs as pieces of artwork in a museum - that museum being the internet.
Original article: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/here-is-the-most-expensive-gif-of-all-time/379556/
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