Barun Roy: India's great artistic divide

I wonder how many people, even artists and art connoisseurs, knew of the existence of V S Gaitonde's untitled landscape that fetched Rs 23.7 crore at the Christie's recent auction of Indian art in Mumbai. I also wonder how many would be lucky enough to see it again, now that it has passed from one private collection to another to remain in hiding until it resurfaces at a future auction, to go into hiding again.

Strangely, the more an artist goes up in marketable fame, the more he or she seems to go out of public view. The urge to exhibit gets less and less. Private collectors and gallery owners quietly drop by and pick up, often for a pittance, whatever the artists produce in the isolation of their studios. The public is left in the lurch. Unlike in art-conscious societies, private collections, personal or private, rarely get publicly shown in India.

Even otherwise, a great divide exists in this country between artists and the community, and no thriving art market can exist in a situation like this. Practising artists know this all very well as they wait in near-empty exhibition halls for visitors to come by and appreciate their works or buyers to show some interest. The Christie's auction itself, although Rs 23.7 crore for a painting sounds fabulous, showed that the Indian art market is still a puny one compared to global centres, especially China, which has now overtaken New York as the world's biggest market for buying and selling art.

New York, London, Shanghai, or Hong Kong make one thing very clear: an art market cannot thrive in a vacuum. There must be a high level of art awareness among the public so people can feel a more heightened desire to own art works to enrich their lives. The divide has to go and a close bond must develop between artists and the community before the Indian art market can be brought out of its isolation chamber.

The question is, how does one go about it? Clearly, tokenisms such as drawing lessons at school or sit-and-draw competitions on Republic and Independence days aren't enough, nor are occasional art fairs and bazaars. We need to go much beyond that, develop a robust museum culture, and think of year-round activities to bring the public face-to-face with fine art in order to sustain its interest and ingrain in society the belief that art is as much a part of one's life as is music, or dance, or films. We needn't look at New York or London or Paris. One has only to look at China, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore to see how values are changing in Asia, too, where the pursuit of art and culture is considered as important as that of economic growth.

There's a virtual boom in museum construction in China, of which the recently opened, 2.1 million sq ft China Art Palace in Shanghai, and the planned redesign of the National Art Museum in Beijing to create 1.4 million sq ft of art space are just two examples. Even many smaller cities in China now have art museums, just as they have cultural and performing arts centres, where special programmes are held for school children, and people go in droves to immerse themselves in a living artistic environment. One has only to look at the calendars of events at museums and galleries in Seoul, Hong Kong, and Singapore to realise how active these are and how far their circles of interest extend. Never before have these places been so much exposed to art from all over the world, nor have people been seen to queue up for hours to enter the exhibition halls and savour the experience.

This doesn't happen in India. We don't have any living art museum. All we have are art morgues, where paintings and sculptures are bought only to be stored, and hung in stale, unexciting, unpublicised, and unguided displays that don't change from month to month. The community has practically no affinity with these institutions. And, yes, we've private galleries, but they exist not to promote art but more to sell their holdings in private or make money by renting out their premises for exhibitions.

Maybe things will change if and when the Kolkata Museum of Modern Art (KMOMA), conceived as a fully-integrated art museum and designed by Herzog & de Meuron, whose works include the ongoing redevelopment of Tate Modern in London, comes into being. Five years have already gone by since the project was first announced and all there's on the ground so far is a foundation stone laid a few months ago. That's the extent of our seriousness. When even our media hold a dimmed view of art promotion and have succumbed to the lures of popular entertainment, what else can one expect?

rbarun@gmail.com