Required Reading

French director and photographer Romain Laurent creates hypnotic GIFs that use very focused movement. See more mesmerizing images at Colossal (via Colossal)

• Christine Murray doesn’t mince words:

“It’s time for architects to choose ethics over aesthetics”

• 99% Invisible is a must listen this episode as they tell the bizarre and shocking story of two Barnett Newman paintings in Amsterdam‘s Stedelijk Museum:

While the painting was on display, a man named Gerard Jan van Bladeren attacked Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III with a box cutter, tracing a series of long slashes through the center of the canvas. When the slashes were added all up together, they measured nearly fifty feet long. Van Bladeren was 31, unemployed, living with his parents, and was a painter himself — although not very successful. He regarded this act of vandalism as an artistic gesture. He saw the painting as a kind of cultural provocation, and one of the main arguments that his lawyer made in his defense was that this provocation called for a reaction and got one.

• Art has many uses:

• Writing for the Remai Modern museum’s blog, Rea McNamara offers us a window in the inner life of critics and art, writing from the inside out:

Nadia always feels self-conscious about her figure. She’s wispy and unwieldy, dangling with the lightest breeze. Her femininity is tangled in those big gold hoops. She’s tweeting an Angela Bassett Revenge GIF in support of the ongoing GoFundMe campaign set up to get that work done.

But with all the work done so far, her material memories are fragmented. Tonight and Benevolent tell her that’s the case for everyone here. Day in and day out, they are the sculptures looked at and talked about—seen from so many different angles, but rarely heard. No one cares about where they come from. The artist left them behind in this temperature-controlled gallery, alone with these transient viewers and bored gallery attendants. The last time she was touched was when the installer positioned her, far away from the tilted white platform Tonight and Benevolent stood on.

• Designer Haik Avanian organized the logos of this year’s Democratic Presidential nominees by categories, and it’s interesting to see the trends:

• The current owner of the LA Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, spoke to Nieman Lab about the vision and future of the newspaper:

I see these newsroom people as my scientists. I completely protect my scientists. These are the human capital of the future. Right? Just like with bioinformatics [a key driver of Soo-Shiong’s medical technology career building]. These newsroom people are the scientists. Nobody values their work, because Google and Facebook take their work for free. The readers think they shouldn’t pay for it. So my next job is to say that their work is valuable. So the newsroom shouldn’t fight me on that — they should actually say, “This is fantastic. Somebody’s standing up for us.”

• A thread we should all keep in mind when it comes to the recent Barr Letter regarding the Mueller Report:

• It’s impossible to unsee these photographs:

• Grammar geek breaking news:

• Good advice:

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.