It isn't every day you stumble across works with an asking price of $25 million or $50 million, so the Impressionist and Modern sale at Sotheby's, in New York, was exceptional for more than just the lineup of artists - Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Jean Miro, Pablo Picasso, Jean Dubuffet, Marc Chagall, Rene Magritte. Amedeo Modigliani's contribution to the sale was a sculpture that sold for $70.7 million, while Alberto Giacometti's Chariot brought the gavel down at a "disappointing" $101 million. Several lots in the auction remained unsold, and yet its total value was a jaw-dropping $442 million. To have seen those works - leave aside their value - was to have been blessed.
But it was a week of surprises in New York anyway. Indian abstractionist V S Gaitonde debuted at the Guggenheim with a retrospective that was eminently well-received, while elsewhere in the museum you could see another abstractionist, William Kandinsky's early figurative works, as well as a collection of masters whose names lit up Sotheby's marquee. At the Met, Estee Lauder's collection of cubist artists Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris and Fernand Leger proved an eye-opener into the passion collectors bring to their world. At MOMA, Henri Matisse's late-career "cutouts" were drawing such huge audiences, they sold tickets by a timetable, while on the fifth floor the masters helped ignite a passion for art yet again - Picasso, of course (how much did he paint anyway?), Monet's fabulously panoramic canvases of his famous lilies, Matisse, Miro, Frida Kahlo and Marcel Duchamp… To be so spoilt was a privilege.
There were other museums, other exhibitions to catch up on, which I confess to doing greedily. At the Frick, there were portraits by Gainsborough, landscapes by Constable and Turner, paintings by Gauguin and Titian. Salvador Dali was available for the swipe of a credit card at a Madison Avenue gallery.
Comparing the scene to back home in New Delhi was perhaps a little unfair, yet was it? India might lack in infrastructure and curatorial quality, but it has sufficient art being shown at any time to quench the thirst of the keenest art voyeur. What is lacking is not so much availability of art spaces and art, or artists, but viewers and their curiosity. It might well be a case of the chicken and the egg, but I would have to say that Delhi - and India at large - suffer from a chronic problem of disinterest. At this point in New Delhi and in Mumbai, there are several pathbreaking exhibitions and retrospectives running, yet even a minuscule percentage of so-called interested art-lovers seem unable to find the time to attend a viewing without the help of that consideration called "cocktails". Where are the audiences, and why must they be spoonfed?
This is vastly different from our experience in New York where we sometimes had to queue for tickets in the rain, braving a half hour in the cold before being allowed in to join the next queue to get to the counter, from where we had to queue to stow away our umbrellas and bags, or to join a curated talk. The buzz and excitement was infectious, no one cut through a line, a few thousand people gawped at art treasures without being loud, boorish or offensive - yes, in America! - and well informed attendants and guides were at hand without being condescending. That's a far cry from home where the good folks will crib about the theory without attempting to experience the reality. Give it a shot, guys - if it ain't so good, it ain't so bad, either.
Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated
