The documentary The Lickers by James Powderly and Eun-Jung Son  presents the phenomenon of painting licking. Painting licking is a  growing underground scene with a diverse membership including graffiti  counterculture, museum cura- tors, activists, and art enthusiasts. They  connect challenging aspirations regarding sports, artistic involvement  in a reinterpretation of art history, and technological hacking of the  surveillance systems of museums and galleries. This highly engaging  documentary suggests another form of appreciating artworks, subverting  the ocular-centric world view. One of the symbolic functions of licking  paintings is the power of nomination. interestingly, the Latin word  lingua and the Slovene word jezik can mean either language or tongue,  therefore licking a piece of art proclaims the piece as worth licking,  talking about, or viewing. The choice of the playful lickers is based on  various interests and reasons. Some choose a particular work of art  according to its monetary value. coming from graffiti culture, some  lickers choose to express their admiration for the artist that inspired  their own work, while others prefer a challenge, choosing instead the  most well guarded masterpieces. 

The lickers have been extremely wary of  surveillance cameras, sensors, and museum personal, hence this behavior  had not been previously recorded. one of the reasons for this is that,  much like Fluxus, the lickers do not see the importance of documenting  their actions (they often don’t see it as art and they are rarely aware  of the larger community of lickers). They attempt to undermine the  sanctimonious manner of behavior in museum spaces that often demands  silence and ritual behavior. The documentary contains maps, essays, and  interviews with the lickers, security guards, art conservators and other  professionals sharing their experiences of this highly peculiar  behavior. What do the lickers experience when they come into contact  with a painting? Why are they exclusively interested only in paintings?  The tasting of the painting goes beyond the divisions into particular  genre or style. When one licks a painting the known categories must be  entirely adjusted to other categories; not just to understand the tastes  such as bitter, pungent, spicy, sour, sweet, salty or just bland, but  more accurately to interconnect the categories and keywords to produce  descriptions like “gripping, sharp, overwhelming” or “silent, bitter,  slightly monotonous”. however harmless or malevolent these acts may be  for the painting, they produce humorous and poignant revelations  regarding the absurdity of the legal and social ideas of ownership,  originality, and property rights.

Nasa Factory 

Nasa Factory, which translates to “screw factory” in Korean, is  an art and design R&D studio based in Seoul, South Korea that  specializes in new media technology, design services and original  equipment manufacturing for the arts, entertainment and commercial  industries. Nasa Factory was co-founded in 2011 by James Powderly and EJ  Son.

Links:  

Graffiti Research Lab: http://www.graffitiresearchlab.com/blog/
Torture Classics: http://tortureclassics.com/
Nasa Factory 나사공장: http://nasafactory.com/
LJUDMILA - Ljubljana Digital Media Lab by KUD.France Prešeren Trnovo: http://www.ljudmila.org/