Balloon Dog Deflated Michael Green’s Ironic Homage To Jeff Koons

Balloon Dog

A GIF artwork which has failed to sell on ebay has become an internet sensation. Created by Michael Green who was hoping to sell the ‘most expensive GIF of all time” and make a cool $5,800, it remained unsold, with no takers, at the starting price of $2000.

“Balloon Dog Deflated” is described on the artist’s tumblr page as, a GIF series “luxury.obj” which explores the desire of class “objects” through the replication and representation of the original object, with specific attention detailed on the essence of the object itself, through the use of various digital lighting and texture techniques.

“Balloon Dog Deflated” is an ironic re-working of the 12 foot stainless steel sculpture “Balloon Dog” (1994) by Jeff Koons, which sold in an auction for $58 million dollars, which according to The New York Times, claims that the sculpture is “the most expensive work sold by a living artist at auction”. Jeff Koons  has a staff of the most skilled “employed” craftsmen to compose his work”.

Michael Green states, The museum of 2014 is the internet. The museum is in Tumblr, the most relevant “space” for the culture to see any work of art and/or image related/unrelated; the spectator and the relationship of the image. Physical museums, like compact discs and books are dead. It’s in the cloud now, and it is time to embrace this fact and make the essence of an art object relevant to everyday society.

WHY 5,800 DOLLARS?  Jeff Koons sold his original “Balloon Dog” through an established auction house for a record $58 million dollars. HISTORY ALWAYS REPEATS ITSELF. Here we are on ebay (a digital auction) with a similar artwork, created in the medium of our times (3D animation/GIF) , about to make history once again. When you commit to buying the original GIF file, rendered directly from the artist’s computer, you will be making history, as you will have purchased the most expensive bitmap image format in the history of mankind I can’t see it happening You can check out the ebay listing here”.                 

The Graphics Interchange Format (better known by its acronym GIF is a bitmap image format that was introduced byCompuServe in 1987[1] and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability. The format supports up to 8 bits per pixel for each image, allowing a single image to reference its own palette of up to 256 different colors chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space. It also supports animations and allows a separate palette of up to 256 colors for each frame. These palette limitations make the GIF format unsuitable for reproducing color  photographs and other images with continuous color, but it is well-suited for simpler images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.

GIF images are compressed using the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) lossless data compression technique to reduce the file size without degrading the visual quality. This compression technique was patented in 1985. Controversy over the licensing agreement between thesoftware patent holder, Unisys, and CompuServe in 1994 spurred the development of the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) standard. All the relevant patents have now expired.

Mr Green has now re-listed the artwork and has a better chance of success after all of the publicity.

See Listing Here

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