ARSHAM DRAWS SPORTS ON TELEVISION JUNE 2026

Six drawings of a television screen, posted to Instagram on June 29, 2026, without a gallery announcement, without a caption explaining what they are. Just the images, and then a question: "What are some of your favorite iconic sports moments?" Daniel Arsham has 4.2 million followers. He already knows what he wants to find out. ## Six Sheets of Paper, Zero Exhibition Text Each drawing in this carousel shows a television set, not the game playing on it. The screen is the subject. The broadcast is a light source. The figures inside the frame are suggestion marks, gestures made in ink or pencil while the broadcast was still live. These are not studies for sculpture. These are records of watching. Arsham has been developing a drawing practice around his television since earlier in 2026, when he posted a separate set of sheets depicting old golf broadcasts. [Those golf drawings arrived alongside his various studio projects](/quick/daniel-arsham-television-drawings-no-archaeology-a7x3k9qz), captioned as a side project outside his main practice. Now the same format continues, with a different subject. Sports moments, plural and unspecified, observed from the same chair in front of the same screen. The drawings are loose and fast. You can see that in the lines. This is not a medium Arsham is laboring over. It is the thing he does between the other things, and that informality is its own argument. The television is always on. The paper is close to hand. The observation is the work. ## Arsham Has Spent a Decade Making Sports Objects The sports draw is not new for him. In 2013, Arsham collaborated with the International Champions Cup to produce match balls illustrated by hand. He subsequently made volcanic ash footballs in blue and black for Inter Milan, crystal boots resting in archival cases, crests rendered in rose quartz. [His football sculpture archive surfaced during the FIFA World Cup group stage in late June 2026](/quick/daniel-arsham-mapped-football-as-a-future-relic-mqvf8yoi), confirming a consistent relationship with sport as material that spans more than a decade. All of that work transforms sport objects into future relics. The crystal and ash and quartz accumulate on the surface of something that normally degrades in a season and make it look archaeological. The decay is fictional. The object is real. The television drawings invert this completely. There is no fabricated decay. The broadcast exists in real time, Arsham watches it in real time, and the drawing is made in the same window. The screen will turn off. The game will end. The paper will remain. This is the only format in Arsham's output where the drawing actually becomes the oldest thing in the room. ## He Closed the Post Asking Which Moments Matter The caption ends with a question, not a statement: "What are some of your favorite iconic sports moments?" This is not marketing. Arsham tends to ask straightforward questions when he wants answers. He has run this pattern before. Research questions appear in his feed when he is working toward something: car posts when the 964 acquisition was approaching, architecture images when an installation is in early development. The television drawings show six specific frames from what appear to be basketball and football broadcasts. He is accumulating visual reference. The question is accumulating memory. His audience includes collectors who bought his work when Phillips offered the Arsham eroded basketball for HK$2.3 million in 2019. It includes the sports figures he has collaborated with across the decade. It includes the Samsung partnership, where he served as ambassador for [The Frame, a television that functions as an art display when not streaming](/quick/arsham-samsung-art-tv-ambassador-art-basel-2026-m7r4k2nx). A television drawing from an artist who spent a year being the face of a premium art television carries a different weight than it would from anyone else. ## Paper Does Not Erode on Purpose Arsham's known output runs on controlled deterioration. Every surface he touches in the studio practice is meant to simulate geological time: the calcium, the crystal growth, the ash layer. The object is supposed to look older than it is. A drawing done quickly from a live broadcast ages the natural way. Ink on paper turns yellow and brittle over decades without any intervention. The fictional archaeology is not present here. These drawings will become relics the honest way, through actual time, not through Arsham's studio process of simulating it. Whether they become a series, a publication, or a wall in the Time Fold retrospective at Perrotin London running through August 8, 2026, the form of the question in the caption implies a collecting phase is underway. Arsham asked which moments matter. The gap between asking and making something from the answers is where the next body of work tends to appear.