'Art is not just for decoration'

Q&A: Krishen Khanna

Veteran arist Krishen Khanna has lent his support to the India Art Summit to be held in Delhi in August, a forum for all stakeholders in India's booming art mart. He speaks to Gargi Gupta

The Indian art scene is a flurry of activity with exhibitions, auctions throughout the year. What's the need for an "India Art Summit"?
At the moment there are individual units, galleries mainly, that are sponsoring events. It's a free for all. No one, least of all the corporate sector, seems to have a clear idea about the directions that Indian art can take, what are the options open to it. The summit should be an ideal forum to educate buyers, especially companies, about this; it can act as a facilitator and a guide.

What is this direction that you'd like Indian art to take?
You see all the buildings going up all over the place. There is no input from artists at the planning stage or what goes inside them. The architect does not liaise with the artist at all. It is after the buildings are done that the art is put in as a PS. But the function of art is not decorative.

I painted the murals for the lobby of the Maurya Sheraton hotel [in Delhi]; M F Husain and Satish Gujral too have done this. It took me four years, first to find out what I could do and then execute the painting. Why hasn't mural-painting taken off since then? Nowadays a painting is put up in the suites more like an ancillary.

What about the general direction of Indian art? Despite the boom do you have any reason for disquiet?
So many of the recent artists are brilliant. But what's worrying is a tendency to emphasise the idea, the making of it and then palming off the making of it to a workshop.

Something very precious is lost with the artists going in for very mechanical modes of production that is the antithesis of art. It's all the money that's driving everyone slightly mad. But yes, it's a very different world from when we first started out.

The continued exile of Husain is a blot on the country. Will the issue be taken up at the summit?
I don't think a summit list this will be the appropriate forum for it.

You're 82, and haven't been well lately. Has it hampered your painting in any way?
I still paint all the time, as does Husain in far-off Dubai and Raza in Paris. That's what keeps us going. I had a show in London last year, this year there's one in Mumbai and later, there'll be one in New York.