Day One is preview day, “for VIPs”, but there’s only one bonafide VIP at the India Art Summit: Nandan Nilekani spends two hours admiring the art, and manages to slip out unnoticed — and unreported — by the paparazzi. That’s quite a feat, but then the press is courting the artists who are the rockstars here. Last year, few made an appearance, or stayed long enough. This year, the aisles are chock-a-block with them: Anjolie Ela Menon draws a crowd, Sunil Gawde signs me a book, Anita Chauhan attracts compliments, Bose Krishnamachari is as vibrant as his paintings, Subodh Gupta looks intellectual, Ved Gupta smiles a lot, Jayasri Burman breezes through, Chittrovanu Mazumdar finds himself explaining his complex work, photographer Rohit Chawla wants you to see his giant-sized book of images, Jitish Kallat is being interviewed, Kanchan Chander goes from booth to booth, Paramjit Singh floats past, Seema Kohli drifts round a corner…
At the booths, gallerists are smiling a lot, little red dots marking the sold works. One Pablo Picasso is definitely sold, one is reserved; one Anish Kapoor is definitely sold, another is reserved. Collectors are wondering whether to buy the Hema Upadhyay or Ray Meeker or Thukral & Tagra — or perhaps all of them. At the seminars, where BS art columnist Bharati Chaturvedi has stationed herself and refuses to budge, apparently there has been some public soul-cleansing over the why-is-husain-absent? dialogue. On the first floor, books and art memorabilia sell faster than cups of coffee.
Gallerists meet other gallerists and smile, shake hands and talk of artists they have in common without rancour. “The market is coming back,” everyone says. There is, surprisingly, no bitching. Gandhiji’s three monkeys inspire artworks from Subodh Gupta to Ved Gupta. The Video Lounge, unexpectedly, is packed with visitors.
The footfalls are unprecedented, and could, by the end of this day, touch 40,000 — not bad considering it opened only on the evening of Wednesday to a select lot. Everyone is celebrating the falling of the bastion of exclusivity that surrounds art, of “inclusiveness” as one gallerist puts it. “These are ordinary people,” says an extraordinary person, snapping her fingers to tell a stall attendant, “I’ll take that one.”
The buzz is that there are Chinese and Korean art collectors at the summit. The bigger buzz is that the directors of far larger art fairs, Shanghai and Basel included, a score of them, are around sussing out both the art and the market. The biggest buzz is that the international media is here too, and reports on the Indian market are making waves in the Western press.
Everyone says things are going well, the energy is positive, in terms of international scale it’s still small but, hey, it’s good, the efficiency is as noticeable as the flies in the cafeteria, that airport customs have handled things well, that there have been no delays, that the management is world class, and isn’t it incredible that the swine flu hasn’t caused art lovers all the way from Chennai and Bangalore to stay away?
Nowhere else have mobile phones been used as much to take as many pictures of artworks. Sculptures, installations, prints, photographs, paintings, mixed-media works in rubber stamps, bottle caps… snap-whirr-flash go the mobile phone cameras as calls are shut off, or conversations stopped midway to catch an artist walk past his work. There are meetings too, curatorial processes being discussed, galleries in conversation with other galleries, artists being tied up for forthcoming shows as far as in 2012 and 2013, for art fairs and museum shows and solos…
For the first time in 2009 the art industry is feeling good about itself. Who wouldn’t if, as some suggest, half the displayed works have probably sold — that’s upwards of Rs 200 crore worth of art, roughly an eighth the size of the entire market, traded in just four days. Phew!
