Johnny-come-lately

So, oh dear, “What do you make of it?” is what appears to concern anyone headed for the United Art Fair in New Delhi. And what, indeed, is one to make of it — a “second” art fair in the first city that has laid siege on the well-established, much larger and more glamorous sibling, the India Art Fair? Does it even bear comparison, this upstart fair running this weekend in the capital’s Pragati Maidan?

To begin, then, with the cliché about comparisons being odious, it doesn’t because its format is different, almost subversive. It has no revenue model apart from a desire to rope in advertisers/sponsors to subsidise it; galleries have been eliminated in favour of artists submitting their work directly to the fair’s screening committee led by chief curator JohnyML (an unenviable, thankless task); and yes, it’s more mela than fair as it attempts to build a bridge for emerging artists whom no, or at least few, galleries are willing to risk their reputations on.

The honest intention serves up a platform for artists looking for their due and collectors for value — but does it deliver on its promise? I was fortunate in having, for company, a keen collector with a very generous budget and a mandate to help identify any work (or works) that he would willingly buy — his contribution to emerging artists of exceptional talent. We teetered up aisles and down corridors, looked left and right, even managing to speak to a few artists — mysteriously, the artworks weren’t labelled — but, despairingly, failed to find anything to take back home.

Apart from an absence of big ideas, there seemed no edginess to the artists’ works, nothing to make you gasp (in joy, surprise or shock), nothing that was provocative — artists, for most part, choosing to play it safe. If their fare was bland, at least some of it came back to the question of selection — should there have been fewer, but “better”, works? Was quality at this “artists driven art fair” at the cost of quality? Certainly, some were so predictable as to overwhelm those others that showed promise.

A refrain from visitors was that too many artists seemed to be ripping off masters, or cloning themselves on their contemporary seniors. If this was a bazaar of India’s future masters, then that future was assuredly bleak, with neither flamboyance, nor an articulation of intelligent art. There was much that was merely decorative, almost nothing that made the heart beat just a little bit faster — a comment, surely, as relevant of today’s buyers as of the artists themselves.

On the upside, a frequently echoed comment was that — surprise! surprise! — the fair “wasn’t tacky”. While the jury is still out on how the works might have been better hung, the gallery-like walls were professionally placed. Some works by known names, a photography section that held a little promise, the Deen Dayal collection, seminars — even, delightfully, a dissenters forum — made up the sum of the fair.

For those wondering if this is an alternative stage to the India Art Fair, the short answer is: No. At best, it is an adjunct to the art movement in the city, helping rather than taking away from that which already exists. Unlike the fashion weeks, to cite one instance, it is neither divisive, nor pitched against its entrenched senior. The more relevant question is not how one is better, or worse, than the other, as much as of markets. While the infrastructure and art — whether brilliant or indifferent — keeps pace with India’s aspirations as a developing economy, the risible question remains: Where are the buyers, emerging or otherwise?

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