A lacklustre year

It’s coming to that time of the year when feature editors will demand their annual round-ups of blockbuster films, most viewed television programmes, best food innovations, most expensive luxury buys, and, of course, a review of the records that were broken in the world of art. Art writers will likely spew purple prose about those who commanded top prices, were exhibited, talked about, awarded.

The news capsules will tell you that it was the year that cost us M F Husain — now exiled forever — and Jehangir Sabavala, though I suspect they might miss two other biggies because they weren’t in the forefront: Biren De and Sohan Qadri. Tyeb Mehta’s prices might earn a mention, perhaps a reference to Raza might be forthcoming; the PR machinery will result in praise for Mithu Sen for lifting the first Skoda prize, even Bharti Kher’s somewhat lack-lustre tribute to the Absolut bottle in the wake of husband Subodh Gupta’s predictable but dramatic recreation of the iconic vodka bottle in the same year.

It’s unlikely though that they’ll tell you that 2011 has been as limp as a wet sock. Can you recall a single innovative show during the year? Anything that broke the mould, invited fresh thinking, enchanted art-lovers and showed the world that India counts for something in the global firmament of art? Sure, there were some interesting retrospectives, we got to see Gulammohammad Sheikh’s work after some length of time, Anish Kapoor’s homecoming exhibitions in New Delhi and Mumbai were welcome (and made him an instant icon), Pundole’s joined the list of auction houses in India, but was there anything that was unexpected, surprising, that bowled you over?

The burden of brilliance must lie not on the shoulders of the masters — who are celebrated anyway, whether in auctions or in their rare outings in gallery shows — but at the feet of the younger artists. Not that the promoters were able to supply us with works to make us sigh and say, ‘that’s genius,’ either. But if the masters had abdicated in favour of second and third generation followers, it was a poor bargain. In a year when India’s presence internationally was dismal (despite a pavilion at Basel), where was the cutting-edge art, the boldness, the ideas?

Market sentiments might have contributed to making promoters risk-averse, but what of the artists themselves? No one artist came out to protest that galleries were unwilling to support their experimentation. The pity is that the new generation, hanging on to the tails of the old, has taken to falling back on clichés in the guise of high art. It’s a betrayal made all the more acute because it has sought the safety of the bazaar which, in recent years, has provided it with creature comforts beyond the imagination of most senior artists — homes in south Delhi or south Mumbai, international travel, the cocooning of spas and cosseting of business class travel and epicurean meals — well-deserved, surely, but earned on the laurels of that past generation.

Has that wellbeing created a generation bereft of inspiration? The new age artist is in danger — hardly of extinction but, alas, of morphing into a drawing room clone driven by the market — providing once again a setback to art at the cost of questionable, even immoral, aesthetics. Once it was the colonisers who took the blame for the kitschification of art in India, but as 2012 nears, it’s time to ask whether the culpability now lies with collectors, promoters or, more unfortunately, the artists themselves?

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