Break out the bubbly yet?

No one is pulling out the whistles and buntings or putting out the confetti and balloons yet, even though the economy began the year with a economic boost. And though the champagne is cooling on ice, no one seems to be in a hurry to pull the cork off the fizzy because what’s to celebrate anyway? The passing of what many refer to as the annus horriblis of art should ideally be enough to call for the bells and hoops, but marking the cliff purely on a fiscal basis would be to overlook the good and the great that happened in 2012.

Sales might have suffered in the year just past but Indian artists remained visible nonetheless — at residencies, in museum shows, at prestigious international venues — bridging the gap all the way from Zarina Hashmi at Guggenheim to Ranjani Shettar in Seattle. Without pressure from galleries, several artists were able to experiment freely, at least some of which was on view at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, about which more later. At the National Gallery of Modern Art in the capital, the year closed with two exciting exhibitions — one on Rabindranath Tagore’s work which had never previously been exhibited, the other on Gopal Ghose.

But dismal sales did cast a pall on the market in which neither auction houses — the bellwether index for art prices — nor galleries registered profits, or indeed growth — though Pundole’s pulled off surprisingly substantial sales, stunning the market with the goodwill commanded by the Pundole family among at least the Mumbai cognoscenti. News from other players hasn’t been nearly as good and while at least one established player sold a substantial stake in the business, there’s news that other galleries are considering the possibility of shutting down soon unless the market picks up —immediately.

Any hope of that rests to an extent on what is now the annual hoopla of the India Art Fair (opening January 31), though to say — as has been said, or perhaps hoped, in previous editions — that it alone reflects the fluctuations of the art market would be fatally flawed. Several gallerists have tended to load all their eggs in the Art Fair basket, ignoring the significance of holding more ambitious exhibitions within their own ambit for the rest of the year, to their own detriment. But where the Fair will have to deliver this year in particular is in the form of serious, new, corporate as well as international buyers who in previous years have tended to be scarce on the ground. Participants will no longer view its success on the number of eyeballs it garners — which is an important measure of people’s interest in art — but on the number of wallets it ends up emptying.

While the bubbly can hold till then, there’s reason to cheer at least the ongoing script of the Kochi Biennale which continues to pull one rabbit out of the hat after the other. It might have started off with administrative hiccups, but everyone seems greatly cheered by the spirit of the venue, the organisers, and the artists despite what appear overwhelming odds. Though its fallout will prove difficult to measure for at least some time, its ongoing engagement and active participation from art schools, regional Lalit Kala Akademis and the like has proved a huge interest in a platform where sales do not count for anything. If in the coming years, Indian artists — the established and the emerging — end up signing for increasingly important international shows, irrespective of the market, that alone should be reason to cheer. Time to pop the champagne after all?

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