Barun Roy: A very private business

ASIA FILE

All the hoopla about modern Indian art has no real existence in the Indian public mind, and the vacuum keeps growing bigger.

Collectors, profiteers and fakers are hijacking contemporary Indian art even before Indians at large have had a chance to be acquainted with it. A Tyeb Mehta or an S H Raza fetching more than a million dollars at a recent New York auction is great news, but how many Indians have actually seen a Tyeb Mehta or a Raza painting and how much do they actually know about their art? To the average Indian, Mehta or Raza or Hussain, or any other top grosser at auctions are names in the news that have no real meaning for them.

It's an issue we should seriously ponder. In other countries, the art business doesn't exist in a vacuum. In Europe and America, people grow up visiting museums, galleries, and museum shops, attending art events and lectures, looking at art on office walls or in public places, or learning about artists and art movements from the media, where art gets its due prominence. So, when people in the West read about Van Gogh, Matisse, Mondrian, Picasso, Dali, or Georgia O' Keefe, they are not confronting strangers but names they are quite familiar with.

Even in Asia, there are nations that take care to make art an important part of their cultural upbringing. All major cities in Japan have at least one art museum "" Tokyo has a dozen. Art in public places is as much a tradition in Japan as it is in the West. The National Museum of Art holds touring exhibitions all over the country, along with lectures and symposiums, so that people even in far-flung areas can acquaint themselves with outstanding works of art.

Travelling art museums are also a feature of South Korea's cultural life, aimed at people who have little access to art events. The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, one of a number of fine arts museums in the Korean capital, holds weekly lectures on artists and art trends for the general public. Museum tours are regularly organised for junior high and high school students.

In China, at least one class for an hour is kept solely for art appreciation in the first two grades of regular senior secondary schools. What is more significant, most schools have student art societies and all kinds of interest groups on art. Provinces, cities, prefectures, and counties organise regular art festivals, where experts come and lecture on how to look at and appreciate art.

By contrast, the average Indian's acquaintance with art begins and ends with drawing lessons at school. Most Indians go through life looking only at portraits of divinities, religious gurus, or forebears at home and movie stars in newspapers, on TV, or on advertising billboards. There's little public art to stimulate people's artistic senses except ill-maintained and often, badly-done statues of national and local celebrities. In the press or on TV, movies merit lengthy coverage, not art. Most cities don't even have an art museum. The few museums that exist do little to promote themselves and attract visitors. Attendance at art exhibitions is pathetic.

Thus, all this hoopla about modern Indian art has no real existence in the public mind, and the vacuum keeps growing bigger. As collectors, investors, and auctioneers get busy, art passes out of the public domain. With prices rocketing with every sale, no public museum in this country will be able acquire new works by major artists any more. Even lesser known artists are now dealing directly with private galleries and buyers, and have little incentive to sell to museums. Museums have failed miserably to be a motivator of art, or art appreciation, in this country.

Already, public exhibitions by India's top artists are a rarity. Their works go as they are produced, directly from their studios to buyers' closets. It's the buyers who decide what to show or when to show, or what not to show at all. They create the hype that creates the market that creates the values for art.

Sometimes a buyer will acquire the entire body of an artist's works at a bargain and even enter a contract to buy all his or her future productions for a specific period of time, establishing a monopoly that will serve well at future sales and auctions.

Of course, all this is good for the artists. They become richer. While auctions don't benefit artists directly, they certainly help inflate their future market values. But the thing is, as their worth goes up, their works go out of the public's reach, and even of the museums. This isn't good for art. In the absence of museums as a strong third force in the market, there will soon come a time when the best of contemporary Indian art will only be heard of as news and not be seen and enjoyed in public.