Work by Sujith KS, a Bodhi Award Winner

The Truth of Art Awards

Art Awards are meant for making certain benchmarks of aesthetics. However, Johny ML finds the recent art award declarations and award exhibitions disappointing. It is high time that the art establishments do away with the democratic transparency in deciding awards and find alternative methods, he says.

“This year’s final jury results clearly brought forth two winners.  It is only fair that these two winners share this equal platform.  The remaining entries not only held lesser rankings, but the next few positions did not vary enough to clearly identify a third winner.  Due to these unusual circumstances, KAVA3 goes to only two winners.” (from Kashi Art Gallery website)

Bodhi Award “is not an instrument of star-creation, there being far too much hype around young artists in the Indian art world today. Rather, the Bodhi Art Award is intended to recognize and nurture talent towards its realization, through a process of dialogue, guidance and mentoring.” (from Bodhi Art Gallery website)

Reading between lines, these two statements indicate a crisis in our contemporary art scene; a crisis in talent search. In Kashi, the committee finds only two awardable artists. The rest is not up to the mark. Bodhi award committee says that these awardees are not ‘gallery ready’. But they could be nurtured ‘through a process of dialogue, guidance and mentoring.” If so, the blame falls directly on to the eminent art institutions for producing young artists who further need ‘dialogue, guidance and mentoring’ to become ‘gallery ready’. What have you been doing, dear teachers all these years? Why didn’t you make them gallery ready? Why you did not prepare them to have at least a third position?

The truth is elsewhere. The art awards, which have now become an annual feature of a few institutions in India, are decided in a democratic way and this democratic process is what engenders mediocrity. The institutions that confer awards invite applications from final year graduate and post graduate students. The award committee appointed by the institutions selects the awardees from the applicants. Apparently innocent, democratic and fool proof this process however puts the experts into a problem area. They need to choose the best out of the ‘available’ whereas they ‘know’ it for sure that the ‘best’ is not there.

An open application system assures democracy, transparency and equal opportunity for the young artists. A few years back art awards were the exclusive prerogative of the state owned institutions. Though democracy and transparency were the watchwords for the awarding process of these institutions, thanks to various reasons nepotism and corruption crept into the system and the general art community lost interest in those awards. Since the blooming of art market in India, many artists, including the younger lot have stopped applying for state awards.

With the advent of the private patronage, awards once again gained its lost prestige in the last few years. Mostly the private awards are not for the established artists. The established ones still aspire for general state awards like Padmashree, Padmabhooshan and so on. Private patrons look at the young and emerging artists and confer them with awards so that they could be nurtured in certain ways. Unlike the state awards, these private awards create a two way system in which the establishment as well as the winner is mutually benefited.

The appearance of private awards in our art scene however needs to be historically contextualized. When the established and mid career artists became extremely costly and unaffordable to most of the patrons, there occurred a necessity to look for fresh talents who are aesthetically pleasing/challenging and affordable. Besides, the market pundits, with the help of data explained that the demand-supply ratio of contemporary Indian art was totally imbalanced and it needed almost seventy percent of supply to satisfy the national and international demand. This finding and related rumors made so many artists and gallerists to push their wares into the art market without heeding much to the demands of a venerable aesthetics.

It was against this historical backdrop that the private establishments, as a drive to generate some benchmarks regarding quality of aesthetics, came forward to set up awards. Awards did/do two things: one, catch the artist young. Two, establish his aesthetics as a benchmark for other artists to emulate and for the market to follow. In setting up the awards, these private establishments, in fact followed the defunct model set up by the state owned institutions. Adherence to democratic process of selection sent out a sense of transparency and equal opportunity in the initial years though its attraction waned soon in the years that followed.

If an award selection committee finds itself tackling with a few less meritorious artists and works, the fingers should be pointed at the very notion of these awards. The presence of less meritorious artists and works before the award committees show that the talented artists are no longer interested applying for awards. Most of the talented final year students in the academies are ‘campus recruited’ by the galleries by the end of the academic year. Hence, they find no compulsion to apply for the so called prestigious awards.

To regain the lost popularity of the awards, first of all the establishments that set up these awards should come out of the hangover of democracy. Art can work for and fight for democracy. But art awards cannot be decided on the basis of democracy and transparency. To find out the best talents, the establishments should send out a panel of experts (that includes an established artist, a critic, a curator, a gallerist, an art market analyst, an art dealer and an initiated viewer) to all the art colleges in India (including those in north eastern states. There are art schools beyond Santiniketan). They should come back with proper documentation (not as send in by the aspirants but documents collected by the panelists for deciding the awardees) and make a few brainstorming sessions at the establishment headquarters. Following this procedure, the panelists and the award setting up agencies can declare the results with a lot of pride.

It is very sad to see eminent people like Ranjit Hoskote, Nancy Adajania and Baiju Parthan making very apologetic statements like, ‘Bodhi award ‘is not an instrument of star-creation, there being far too much hype around young artists in the Indian art world today.’ Kashi has not revealed the names of the panelists. At least that saves the day for the panelists. Vadehra is on its way to declare its young talent awards. India Habitat Centre and Art India Magazine together declare another award for the fresh talents. Unfortunately, all of them have the defunct democratic model of Lalit Kala Akademies. We need brave hearts to set up awards and declare awards.