Abdoune following his purchase of the painting. Photo: Sacha Jafri.
Inside a ballroom at the Atlantis Hotel on a manmade archipelago in Dubai, British artist Sacha Jafri made history. On March 24, he sold his work
The Journey of Humanity for $62 million, making it the second most expensive painting ever sold at auction by a living artist. The price isn’t the only grandiose part: at 17,000 square feet, the equivalent of four NBA-regulation basketball courts, the painting has claimed the Guinness World Record for the largest art canvas.
On a normal day in a normal year, such a mind-boggling price would immediately make waves around the world. But the sale came less than two weeks after an NFT by the digital artist Beeple fetched $69 million at Christie’s, and the art world seems only able to process one historic price fetched by one relatively unknown artist at a time.