Writing articles about video games is so much fun that we often have to stop, wipe the manic grins off our faces and find something really boring to do. Sometimes we stare at a blank white wall and recite the Declaration of Independence under our breath, other times we watch Lost in Translation. Now we have a new option: We can play The Artist is Present, a game about waiting in line at New York's Museum of Modern Art created by Pippin Barr.

Unfortunately for us, the game's backstory is pretty entertaining. Contemporary artist Marina Abramović held an exhibit in 2010 that had people waiting hours in line for a chance to look into her eyes for as long as they wanted, and Barr used that idea to make a hilariously serious game about the contemporary art experience. In the game, you enter MoMA, buy a ticket and -- surprise -- wait in line to stare into Abramović's eyes.

Do institutions and galleries have a growing interest in New Media? Two weeks ago, I identified the art “internet bubble” at The L Magazine, a trend that’s currently giving new media the spot light. Not everyone sees new media the same way though. Domenico Quaranta, an Italian writer and curator previously best known to this blog for “Holy Fire“, a dubiously themed new media exhibition in Brussels that included only “collectible” work, being one such example. Quaranta’s followed up the 2008 exhibition by writing a whole book on the subject of New Media — “Media, New Media, PostMedia” — one core theme being that the field isn’t accepted in the contemporary art world. ”New Media Art is more or less absent in the contemporary art market, as well as in mainstream art magazines,” he writes in his abstract, ”and recent accounts on contemporary art history completely forgot it.”

Perpetual online auction, internet connection, custom programming and hardware, acrylic cube... Combining Robert Morris' Box With the Sound of Its Own Making with Baudrillard's writing on the art auction this sculpture exists in eternal transactional flux. It is a physical sculpture that is perptually attempting to auction itself on eBay. Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself. If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.

Corey Arcangel is perhaps the internet's most infamous hack, masher-upper, digi/net artist. His work stands for a growing culture of artists who run wildly through animated GIF landscapes populated with corrupted data-compressed bunny rabbits and tinny, MIDI renditions of Savage Garden ballads. As the Lisson Gallery, London, opens its archives to Arcangel's curatorial eye, could digi/net art be set to infect the real, fleshy world, like a rampant Conficker Worm? Has YouTube become the truest reflection of our anthropological selves? Are we destined to roam the int3erw£bs like the mythic beasts of yore, hoping, in time, that digi art can free us from the confines of this fleshy void?

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Many factors have lead to London’s pre-eminence in the contemporary art world: the importance of Goldsmith’s College to the Hirst generation of YBAs, Saatchi’s ubiquitous influence as a collector, Jay Joplin’s White Cube gallery, the founding of the annual Frieze art fair, and of course, the Turner Prize, that annual award set up in 1984 to celebrate new developments in contemporary art presented each year to a British artist under fifty for an outstanding exhibition in the preceding twelve months. It has always been a controversial affair. There was, of course, that bed (it didn’t win) and Martin Creed’s minimal light bulbs that simply went on and off. Last year, the shortlist was universally derided as opaque and pretentious. But looking back over its history, love it or hate it, The Turner Prize has become a barometer of the British art scene. Those nominated, often previously unknown outside the art world, usually end up as household names.

This year the short list feels subtly di

A collection of Polaroids, one per day, from March 31, 1979 through October 25, 1997:

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/15131

There’s no author listed, no contact info, and no other indication as to where these came from.

At first glance, the central premise of the Hayward’s summer show seems to court too eagerly the tedious controversy around neuroaesthetics. "Walking in My Mind" aims to "transform the gallery’s unique spaces into a giant brain by bringing together large-scale installations that explore the workings of the mind in different ways ... while at the same time inviting visitors to explore their own thought processes." It’s potentially a clunky conceit, and it risks the sort of interdisciplinary pratfalls that have made for such bathetic reading in recent attempts to bring together art and brain science. It’s as yet unclear exactly what, if anything, is to be gained from the neurologist Semir Zeki’s assertion that artists "are unknowingly exploiting the organization of the brain"; nor does John Onians’s book Neuroarthistory (2007) really convince with its claim that art critics like Ruskin and Pater were actually neurologists in disguise all along. Fortunately, Stephanie Rosenthal, the Haywa

A discursive model of praxis has developed within the critical art context over the last twenty years. It is the offspring of critical theory and improvised, self-organized structures. It is the basis of art that involves the dissemination of information. It plays with social models and presents speculative constructs both within and beyond traditional gallery spaces. It is indebted to conceptual art’s reframing of relationships, and it requires decentered and revised histories in order to evolve.