Who Really Paid the Piper?

Fig 1. Screenshots retrieved from Instagram (2025) © All rights reserved to original creators

There’s a reason why he grew up to be at the level he did. Does that mean he has no skill?

Who really gets to choose what to and what not to show? And hence, how do we decide?

Who really paid the piper?

Are we all not thinking about these questions as well in one way or another? How do we start addressing these questions?

A couple of nights ago, I came across a reel by @nurvi.draws, which accused Abhay Sehgal of stealing someone’s artwork. As the algorithm works, one after another, as the night proceeded, my feed kept flooding with all the videos a lot of people in the community have created on this topic – some accusing him and some defending him.  My first thought was to understand what Sahil and Emma at Method think of this situation, as they were one of the first influencers (not the social media kind, actual influencers) in the industry to recognise him as a practitioner. It seems like they have also cancelled him by removing the details of the show “Add to Cart” from the website and all the posts from the instagram page, except one poster. Not just them, even the founders of You Cannot Miss This/Delhi Art Weekend have seemed to remove his posts. I wonder, was there any statement from them? Why should everything happen behind the scenes? 

And I wonder, if his works were allowed to be sold by many more institutions globally at the rate they were, would the works of the artists whose idea these originally were be sold at the same rate? Would their works even be looked at by the key influencers in the arts? How many galleries have chosen to represent their work? There is definitely something about practitioners like Abhay Sehgal, no matter how unethical or ethical they are, they are skilled for sure – they know how to sell themselves. Today I  am writing to not choose sides, but to question and ask the ones who are reading this to read this piece by thinking of the larger picture I am trying to put forth, and not with the anger you might have for this person. 

When Pei-Shen Qian was forging Rothkos and Pollocks, his works were bought by one of the prestigious art galleries and patrons in the US, under the guise of Rothko, he must have earned a lot. For almost fifteen years, when Qian’s works were on a rich family’s walls under the guise of a Rothko, people wept and celebrated the work of a poor man who just wanted to ensure his family was doing okay. Was a Rothko look-alike not as beautiful as a Rothko original for fifteen years? Sehgal’s works, no matter how unethical they are, do they not have something about them that fooled us all for almost five years? And will still continue to. 

A lot of us have noticed the kind of blurriness and missing parts of body in the paintings he makes, the kind of mistakes AI makes, if we can now after five years find some of these mistakes by going on this “treasure hunt” situation of deep diving into his works – can we think for a moment, would he have not realised these mistakes himself while “painting” them? He could have easily flipped this story by making it seem intentional and changing the intention behind making these works to seem as though they are AI-generated or they have been intentionally made to have that level of unclarity to give it the essence of blurriness! (What if this was his plan all along, haha?) But jokes aside, we all know we would have looked at these exact paintings very differently if they were shown to us with a different narrative.

Should we sideline the new “forger” and not give him the traction anymore? Should there be a new section in the creative education curriculum? How can we really keep up with the rapid technological advancements? Above all, who really decides who gets a seat at the table? How do we define what falls under copyright infringement and what doesn’t, and how do we teach our practitioners not to fall into this trap? How do we decide whose work is original and whose is not? How do we know that two practitioners living in two different parts of the world or who are literal neighbours aren’t aware of one another’s practice and are original in their own essence? Does it really matter who did it first? Let’s look at these works: 

Fig. 2.1 and 2.2 

Would you guess at first instance that they are by two different artists? These (Fig. 2.1 and 2.2) are works ‘Stress Injunction’ by Enzo Prina and ‘Distort Mini IX’ by Ashna Malik. Their creative process is also very similar! In fact, Ashna even follows him on instagram, which might mean that she is aware of his practice and is okay with it. So, can we say they are copying each other? Which one is actually the original? Just because Prina started posting his works online before Malik, are his thoughts original? Or are Malik’s works original because she went to the ​​Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia? Because Abhay’s pedigree is also very prestigious, coming from the School of Arts Institute of Chicago (SAIC). 

Our generation asks the right questions, we have the rage and enthusiasm about it — even as I write, I believe I am asking questions that are relevant to my urgencies, but what’s next? How do we go from questioning and cancelling to responding and resolving? These are the questions we need to start responding to as we build our community. These are some of the questions the practitioners and key influencers in the industry need to address!

Are we getting into our institutional critique phase? Our generation has just started venturing out; we have a long way to go still! Now is not the time to choose sides, but to really think where we are all headed. What do you all think?

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Fig. 1: Screenshots retrieved from Instagram (2025) © All rights reserved to original creators

Fig. 2.1: Stress Injunction by Enzo Prina (2025), image retrieved from: https://enzoprina.com/pages/2025-work

Fig. 2.2: Distort Mini IX by Ashna Malik (2024), image retrieved from: https://themethod.art/products/distort-mini-ix-by-ashna-malik?_pos=1&_sid=f4981f05d&_ss=r