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 probab...
The 27th of May marked the 319th anniversary of the founding of St Petersburg by Tsar Peter the Great in 1703. On the site of a captured Swedish fortress and named after apostle Saint Peter. Saint Petersburg is the heart of Russian culture. It is the city associated with the birth and rise of the Russian Empire closer than any other. Petersburg was the capital city, governed by the Tsars and the Empire, all the way to 1918 when it was replaced by the Bolsheviks who took their government to Moscow. It is the second largest city, on the Neva River and went through name changes too; known as Petrograd from 1914 to 1924 and Leningrad from 1924 to 1991. After a referendum, the original name was restored. This magnificent city holds in its honour the lions of literature. Petersburg was the pivot for the best of education, art, science and society. It holds immense importance in both poetry and prose. All of Fyodor Dostoevsky's main works are set in Petersburg where he spent the la...