India's Crypto Art King Mines the Future

As the world around him grapples with the NFT frenzy, Raghava K.K. has been plugged into the metaverse for years, mining one of its greatest promises: getting art to the people.

- NIDHI GUPTA

If you ask Raghava K.K., the media hype around last October’s events didn’t quite tell the whole story. “This Indian artist has set a new record with his $94,500 [₹72 lakh] NFT at a Sotheby’s auction” went breathless headlines after his landmark sale at Boundless Space, the auction house’s first experiment with NFTs. In a year when a niche artist like Beeple shot to global fame when Everydays: the First 5000 Days became the third most expensive work ever sold by an artist, it wasn’t really surprising that the numbers were all that mattered.

Raghava’s La Petite Mort (French for “the little death”), which scored the fifth-highest bid at the Sotheby’s auction, had been several years in the making. It involved an entire team of scientists and painterly robots, engineered by ArtMatr, “the world’s first art genome platform”; A.I. software; and custom-made paint from Israel. Mainly, it involved Raghava hooked up to a machine whose tendril-like wires captured his brain waves as he experienced the most intimate of all human experiences. That headline could’ve, should’ve been: “Raghava K.K. has become the first man on the planet to sell an orgasm.”