There is a new era of contemporary art setting in India. The fall of the market will be the rise of young and fresh artists with newer concepts of individuality related to political, religious and social issues. They will question the system with their new philosophy and work by them, leaving no choice for the spectators.
Not only the artists, this will create a new breed of collectors who will show keen interest in the artist. Ask questions of the creative intention. Travel to their studio and see the artist at work.
Galleries will showcase and represent this new generation of artists with their new ideologies.
They will take these artists to the auction houses, who will encourage the investors to buy the art, make the artists stars, until they stagnates to one iconic style, becoming nothing but a production house.
The collectors will get greedy, the artists will be "satiated and content", the bubble will get bigger, and finally burst.
The collectors (investors) will get bored of the same works by the same artists. The system will get tired of the monotony. The artist will get frustrated. Everything will be dark and gray.
Finally, a new age of artists will emerge. They will change the system...............
There is a feeling in some corners that contemporary Indian art has not (yet) established itself as a major and sustained ‘global’ presence. Artists curators claim that this is modest and intermittent by comparison, for instance, with the domineering attendance contemporary Chinese art has secured since its advent on the ‘global’ scene in the late 1980s, or how east and south east Asia have recently become hubs of a much larger scale. However, very rarely do we express concerns about monopolizing of cultural capital, an oligarchic control over knowledge and resources. We also fail to consider that China as a nation, (and not just its art) enjoy much greater attention than India does on a global scale. It enjoys more attention in the UN, Olympics, Biennales, sea trade…etc. Is it an unfair argument that ‘contemporary Indian art’ cannot locate itself outside the operative hegemony called ‘contemporary India’, and the various hegemonies that operate within it? And is this question relevant even as (or specifically because) a newly dominant strand within ‘contemporary Indian art’ is deeply engaged with forces blurring national boundaries, taking up representational roles in ‘global art institutions’ and creating an oligarchy of power?
ReplyDeleteOne of the biggest problems has been that the great inflow of financial and cultural capital, have some how bypassed the grassroots infrastructure of Fine Art in India. Institutional neglect, and lack of non-institutionalized support, ensures skeletally existing library facilities, scant archives, and absolute neglect as ‘conditions’ of art colleges all over the India. The net as a medium is extremely difficult to access, and that coupled with the lack of English education, is keeping out art students from the domain of knowledge that is now dominating the multicultural contemporary art. Essentially there is not enough of the (new) money and exposure coming back to nurture, or to even have a debate with the grass roots. It does seem that the poor, peasant, and the proletariat as categories have become grossly out of fashion in Marxist thought, and with that these ‘residual’ categories seem to have lost the right to be ‘talked to’ or engage with…contributing to a collapse of the ‘local’ as a point of consideration. The ‘local’ and its ‘public’ could be the ‘inspiration’ informing the work, can even be the ‘represented’ in the works, but somewhere s/he seems to have lost the right to be considered to be ‘peer’…the work is no longer addressed to him/her.