Art news now: Museums struggle, an ‘eco-friendly’ NFT platform crops up

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!

Museum footfalls dip worldwide

In a survey carried out annually by The Art Newspaper for more than 20 years now, it has emerged that in the last one year, when the pandemic forced closure on an unprecedented scale, visitor numbers to the the world’s top 100 museums and art galleries plunged by a whopping 77 per cent. This brings visitors down from 230 million in 2019 to just 54 million in 2020. The Louvre in Paris maintained its position as the world’s most visited museum, but faced an income loss of at least €90 million. The Tate Modern in London and British Museum follow. The Guardian has more statistics.

Hirst to debut eco-friendly NFT platform

Amid a huge and rapid boost in non-fungible token or NFT purchases, a barrage of criticism has come to the fore that the sales consume too much energy. To target this, a new digital marketplace called Palm has kicked off, aiming to be more ecologically efficient, and the bold artist Damien Hirst is helming this debut. With the Currency Project, he will bring 10,000 oil paintings on paper to the portal, with more details on the initiative to follow in coming days. ART News has the scoop.

Warhol loses copyright battle posthumously

The Andy Warhol Foundation has lost a copyright lawsuit after a prolonged battle against photographer Lynn Goldsmith. The tussle was over Warhol’s use of a 1981 photograph of Prince from the shutterbugs Prince Series. While Warhol’s side had argued that it was ‘fair use’, an American judge has now reversed the same, ruling that authorised a photo of Prince used in a series of the pop artist’s silkscreens instead. The Prince photo was originally taken by Goldsmith in 1981, and was repurposed by Warhol for a Vanity Fair cover in 1984, with the publication paying to license the portrait for the illustration. However, the Prince Series eventually extended. Dazed checks out the long-standing battle.

6 pioneering pop artists

And speaking of Warhol, naturally Pop Art is synonymous. This art movement followed the popularity of Abstract Expressionists, and breathed new life into the modern art scene from the mid-1950s to the late ‘70s, challenging values of mass culture, post-war manufacturing, and the media boom. Some names stand out in this movement, including of course Andy Warhol, as also Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney, and Keith Haring. My Modern Met briefly explores their position in the course of art history.