Protests at Hong Kong Art Basel; Banksy loses copyright tussle with greeting card company

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!

Protestors at Hong Kong Art Basel

‘No art without freedom’, said activists who “hijacked” Art Basel Hong Kong over the weekend, installing four miniature “Lady Liberty” protest statues around the exhibition. The “Lady Liberty HK” Facebook page said on Saturday that art fans should “go see it before it’s gone.” The 2021 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong took place at the Convention & Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai last week. The event was scaled down owing to the Covid-19 pandemic. Hong Kong Free Press reports.

Banksy loses trademark fight with greeting card company

The “Cancellation Division” of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) just issued a decision declaring a trademark owned by street artist Banksy invalid — and also quoted him indirectly, as he himself believes ‘copyright is for losers’. The ruling came after greeting card company Full Colour Black Limited, a specialty retailer of street art greeting cards, went head to head with Banksy over its use of Banksy’s Laugh Now — one of the artist’s most famous images, it shows a monkey wearing a sandwich board. Artnet News spanshots the irony.

View da Vinci’s notebooks online for free

One reason historians know so much about the Renaissance Man — painter, inventor, and scientist Leonardo da Vinci — is because of the numerous notebooks he kept from the 1480s until his death in 1519. He explored many fields that interested him in these books, like anatomy, physiology, engineering, art, etc. And, you can read a lot of his material online, such as perusing Codex Arundel via The British Library, Codex Atlanticus via The Visual Agency, Madrid Codices online via The Biblioteca Nacional de España, and more. My Modern Met has the details.

Christie’s Warhol NFT: A ‘fake’?

Golan Levin, Director of the Studio for Creative Inquiry, on Wednesday explained via Twitter that Christie’s newest NFT auction isn’t technically selling Andy Warhol’s recovered Amiga files, but essentially “altered, 2nd-generation near-copies” of each digital rendering. According to Christie’s announcement, Machine Made offers the “ground-breaking sale of five digital works created by Warhol in the mid-1980s and recovered from obsolete floppy disks in 2014”. But Levin details how the files currently available for bid were specifically upscaled from 320x200px to 6000x4500px, and more. Input Magazine elaborates.