Big, Blue $43.8 million Newman “Zip” Painting On the 8 th of October, a lift technician at a museum in the Netherlands mistakenly threw away a piece of artwork made to look like two empty beer cans. Last year, the infamous artwork consisting of a banana duct-taped to a wall was eaten by a hungry visitor to a gallery in Seoul, South Korea. Last month, I went to an art gallery and convulsed my face in disdain at the random blobs of paint that covered the canvases on the high walls. Modern art can be quite the sore spot for us connoisseurs. The painful abstract paintings, novels of base vocabulary, CGI drowned movies and music made on one beats app with auto-tune or nonsense lyrics physically hurt. I know I sound like your grandmother here, but bear with me when I ask you; how do you feel when you see a plain canvas covered entirely in blue paint? What emotions does a blue rectangle evoke? To me, none. But what if I told you that rectangle sold for almost $44 million? You’d probably a
The sun set long ago; it is past midnight. Lahore's nightlife is sleepy. The roads are finally peaceful with only the dark sky, big trees and illuminating streetlights. A rare sight. Time to go home in the merchants’ minds. All offices closed; all shops shuttered down. To bed to rise again. This is not the full picture. When the shops were closing in Township. A little boy stood in the street, a fruit vendor. There were a few tiny and almost rotten guavas on his cart. You could tell it never had fresh goods on it. He feels he didn't make enough, at an hour past midnight he starts hollering for customers "only fifty rupees!" looping. Uttering silly gibberish as he dusted his fruits. He was only 7 or 8. We asked him where his father was. "It's just me" he replied, nothing more, it could've meant anything. We gave him fifty rupees to have a guava for himself. It moved him to tears. I don’t know what became of him next. At Link Road the old man sits on