A few weeks ago, artist and illustrator Krishna Bala Shenoi learnt that an artwork he had made in 2021 had turned up on a painting by Delhi-based contemporary artist Abhay Sehgal. Shenoi’s Cottonboy was, as the Bengaluru-based artist has noted in a now viral Instagram post, “transplanted pixel for pixel onto [Sehgal’s] canvas”. 

This isn’t the first time his cotton candy boy has been used elsewhere without permission, Shenoi tells us. Followers have apprised him in the past of the painting appearing as T-shirt prints and even as a mural in a restaurant. “I’m not litigious and I have let it go,” he tells us. “Even with Sehgal’s work [titled All for One], I saw that my painting was a small part of his collage and didn’t initially feel transgressed upon… What bothered me this time around was the caption. It had him talking about it as if it was a painting.”