Against the gallery

By getting artists directly and giving them an open platform to reach out to audiences, United Art Fair has taken a radical route. Will it work?

It’s never easy to come second on the scene. So it may be inevitable, but a little unfair, that United Art Fair (UAF), which ends at New Delhi’s Pragati Maidan today, should be compared with its more established predecessor, the India Art Fair. But more important, can the market, battling a significant downturn in buyer sentiment, accommodate two annual art jamborees?

Viewers sure are walking in in droves — 4,000 on Friday, the first open day of the fair and nearly double of that yesterday — attracted by the absence of entry fee. But are they buying? In the first two days, the organisers reported enquiries for 65 per cent of the works (there were, however, no figures for how many of these converted into sales). That seems healthy enough, given that prices at UAF start at an affordable Rs 15,000 (going up to a maximum of Rs 90 lakh for the emerging artists category; the masters, of course, are priced far higher).

But if UAF had hoped to discover, or tap into a category of new, middle-class art buyers, it isn’t going to happen this year, a fact that Annuraag Sharma, founder and director, seems to well know. “Look at them,” he says, pointing to a gaggle of students in blue salwar-kameez school uniforms. “I can’t expect them to buy now. But they are here and they are looking. When they grow up and start earning, it is young people like these who will buy art.” On such boundless hopes and tenuous business plans rest the future of the domestic art market.

MUST SEE

Untitled, an installation by Megha Joshi
“House of chappals” would be a fair description of this work which is placed right in front of the entrance. It is a structure, shaped like a temple, made of gold-plated Bata rubber slippers. Inside, the backs of the chappals are painted black. A large round mirror is placed on the floor inside. 

The Loot, Manish Sharma
This is a pick-up van made of fibre-glass and painted white. The back is loaded with what looks like a pile of stuff — it’s the bits and pieces of the havelis of Sharma’s native Bikaner that are being carted away daily. 

Electric Man, Maripelly Praveen Gaud
The 25-year-old Baroda-based artist has made little figures that look like African-totems with odds and end such as whiskey bottles, old bulbs, switches, plastic dusters

Sold Out, Everyone wants to play this game, Raj More
This 33-year-old Mumbai-based artist has a distinctive voice — he paints the public transport system of the city, its local trains, autorickshaws, taxis in thick, flowing impasto. 

But what Sharma has attempted to do with UAF — bypass galleries and get artists to participate directly — is quite radical. It is definitely a risk for Sharma, who has spent Rs 15 crore on the fair. But the Delhi-based entrepreneur, who runs an art handling company called United Artlogistics, has already booked the venue for three days next year — and a larger 200,000 sqft space than the present 80,000.

Commercial galleries have been the mainstay of the modern art business, in the West and in India, showing art and promoting artists, for which they charge the latter anywhere between 30 and 50 per cent of the sale value. At art fairs all over, it is galleries that participate, paying hefty rents to hire space. The advantage of the gallery system is that it leaves artists, who are anyway deemed not to have the flair or inclination for commercial matters, free to concentrate on art. But it also has the disadvantage of leaving artists inordinately dependent on gallery owners who, being businessmen in the final analysis, tend to play it safe with established, saleable aesthetics, leaving a large majority, especially young, emerging artists, with few opportunities to get a shoo in. By going directly to artists, UAF has given them an open, reasonably high-profile platform to appeal to audiences (and buyers) mediated only by the curatorial direction of Johnny M L, the fair’s project director, and others like senior artists K S Radhakrishnan and Nanak Ganguly, art educator Deepak John Mathew, and art administrator Diwan Manna. The fact that artists didn’t have to pay to participate has been the icing on the cake (they will pay 35 per cent of the price of the artworks they sell). No wonder the fair has as many as 480 “young and emerging” artists in the Mirror section. Even more creditable is the fact that the curatorial team has not confined their attention to the urban centres of art in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Baroda but has young (or not so young), little-known artists from provincial centres such as Vapi, Muzzafarpur, Amalsad, the North-East, Goa, and so on.

The result is a jumble of mediums — paintings in oil, acrylic, watercolour, sculptures, installations, collages and mixed-media works, photography, digital images, prints — and of expressions, some inchoate, many derivative, and very few original. The impression of a hotchpotch is further enhanced by the lack of a discernible layout to frame the display or signages to guide visitors on their way — the “street names” after eminent artists are an artificial device and do not help.