World\’s largest painting sold! (And a billionaire setting up an NFT e-gallery)

A SUMMARY OF THE MOST EXCITING ART NEWS FROM AROUND THE GLOBE

While we focus on Indian art, we can’t obviously function in a vacuum. It’s a small world and everything is connected, especially on the web. So, let’s train our spotlight across the world map to see what’s going on — from art trends to socio-political issues to everything that affects the great aesthetic global consciousness. Or, let’s just travel the world and have some fun!

Size does matter!

The world’s largest painting has sold for $62 million at an auction in Dubai’s Atlantis, The Palm Hotel this Tuesday. At 17,000 square feet, Sacha Jafri’s The Journey of Humanity (2020) is an abstraction featuring drips, whorls, and splatters of various hues, and breaks the painting size record as certified by the Guinness Book of World Records. Its price is not far behind the $69 million Beeple NFT piece sold at Christie’s earlier in March. ART News has all the details.

New record for Western Art in Asia

A Jean-Michel Basquiat painting of a warrior made in 1982 has sold for $41.8 million at Christie’s Hong Kong on Tuesday. At a time when Asian buyers’ appetite for Western blue-chip trophies is growing steadily, the sale exceeded the previous record for a Western artwork sold in Asia — Gerhard Richter’s abstract painting worth 27.7 million, sold at Sotheby’s last October. A Christie’s expert opined that Eastern collectors are increasingly making links between traditional artists and Western art history. Artnet News elaborates.

Now, a digital art gallery for NFTs

Thanks to recent events in the digital art market, the money-makers now have their vision firmly in place for this sector in future. Now, billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban is building a new online gallery to display non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in any form. The platform will allow users to display their digital art and collectibles in one place as well as share their collection on social media platforms. The new project — dubbed Lazy.com — is effectively an online gallery for artworks, and the process of joining is pretty simple, too. The Block explores.

Blood-soaked art nixed in Oz

The edgy Australian Dark Mofo festival in Tasmania has cancelled plans to commission an artwork of the UK flag soaked in indigenous people’s blood, titled Union Flag by Spanish artist Santiago Sierra. The festival had asked for “First Nations peoples from countries claimed by the British Empire” to volunteer to donate small amounts of blood, to bring together an installation that conveys the pain and destruction caused by colonialism. But critics, including several Aboriginal Australians, called the work abusive, tone-deaf and re-traumatising. Sierra’s previous provocative works have included casting sculptures from human faeces. BBC News reports.