Art in rice fields, art in space, and art on your platter

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!

Artists interpreting food, over the ages

At the 2017 Art Basel, Subodh Gupta served a seven-course feast of authentic Indian cuisine, including dishes from Bihar, to over 20 guests in four daily sittings, for a week. The spread included lentil soup, bhel puri, khichdi and saffron yogurt layered with slices of banana. The guests ate, chatted and made new friends. The project “Cooking the World” at Art Basel was not his first meal-based installation/performance. In April 2020, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, introduced the series “Cooking with Artists”, with NYC-based artist Anicka Yi preparing lemon pasta with parmesan, peas and fresh herbs, and architect-artist Hugh Hayden baking the perfect cornbread pudding. Spanish artist Salvador Dali, on the other hand, brought surrealism into his studio and kitchen, as is evident in his 1973-cookbook Les Diners de Gala. The intersections of food and art are centuries old, even as the latter has served as a register of the times. The Indian Express serves up a fascinating long read on the presence and absence of food in art.

Amoako Boafo Is Sending an Artwork to Space

Rising-star artist Amoako Boafo has been commissioned to paint three panels of a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket ship that will be launching on a roundtrip mission to space this fall. Titled Suborbital Triptych, the commission is part of a partnership between the Jeff Bezos–founded aerospace manufacturer Blue Origin and the new art program at Uplift Aerospace, curated by Jill Clark. The initiative is one of a growing number involving art-world power players making their way into the cosmos. Mega-collector Yusaku Maezawa plans to take more than a half-dozen members of the public (all of whom, initially, were expected to be artists) to the moon aboard a SpaceX rocket in 2023. Artsy has all the details.

Rice fields mark Tokyo Olympics in planted art

Part of a yearly tradition started by the town of Gyoda in Saitama Prefecture in 2008, a massive artwork marking the Olympics emerges in the sprawling, vivid green rice stalks. The huge, living installation features iconic Japanese images: the famous wave and Mount Fuji of Katsushika Hokusai\’s woodblock print and a Kabuki actor in striking face paint, similar to one that featured at the Olympic opening ceremony. In 2015, they even scooped a Guinness World Record for creating the world’s largest rice field artwork: 28,000 square meters. This year\’s image was intended to highlight Japan\’s cultural heritage, on the assumption that crowds of foreign visitors would be in the country for the Games. Japan Today paints the picture.