Partisan Review of Indian Art

Uma Nair

The first Indian Survey by Art Tactic reflects a confident market with optimists outweighing pessimists. Surely not coincidentally, it ranks its observations by accessibility, taste, and style, but not depth or insight. It states:
` Economic outlook remains positive: A large majority of respondents feel Positive (48%) or Neutral (47%) about the 6-month economic outlook, only 5% felt negative about the economy in 6 months time.'

What it does not say is that the minimal difference between 48% Positive and  5 % Negative is a highlight of indeterminate prophecy and foresight and if that rules out criticism with greater ambition, it should not sound altogether crass. For one thing, it attests to the conundrum of art in an increasingly commercial scene. No movement, with a theoretical/intellectual, commercial champion, claims to be changing much of anything.

In turn while Indian Art has come a long way what is somewhat intriguing is the small vestibule of names offered. It throws up pertinent questions: Have major players in the Indian art mart been interviewed and pursued? Who defines major players? Are they chosen by visibility in media/monetary mechanics/auction performances/frequency of auction highs or the virtue of merit?

`Can a report of India be based on a handful of major players who dictate the market? asks Vijay Laxmi Dogra of Art Indus.`  
Meanwhile, Art Tactic's report looks like an extension of its advertising and reads like a card catalog of certain group of happening galleries and auction houses who have offered their opinions with disregard for art history. Ironically, the magazine then holding a  6 month survey on whether Indian art can do better/worse if confidence levels are rising or stagnant is like creating a study which is all about a thinned out description without discretion and direction.

The names figuring in the study seem somewhat studied/deliberately defined according to desirous patterns. And they eschew the narrowness and provincialism of the Indians the Art Tactic team met, and their pseudo-intellectualism–to which they reacted with monetary-mechanisms. `Let’s face it. Auction results have in the past pointed towards a definitive rigged stance wherein prices were inflated to soaring heights,' says a collector in London.

Success cannot be designed or defined by a partisan few. It has to be defined by the people who made it happen. There are many artists who form part of the art infrastructure. There have been galleries who have toiled for many years and they too form part of the abacus of monetary mechanics. What is also peculiar is how Art Tactic creates a report within the periphery of a sampling rather than a wider abacus of scrutiny.
What the study limits itself to is the circumference of an elite few but they seem to have left out those who had had firsthand experiences.` What about the artists who have belonged to the auction framework in the past 5 years?' asks Vijay Laxmi. `Any study is based on a record that spans a period of time. It cannot look only at a specific period that reflected a high.' she adds.

Indeed in the Indian art mart there are greater and lesser galleries; and what this report disregards is that there has been a vital and imperative split between traditional high culture-elite art and lower mass culture and lesser art that does not project or aspires such high prices, but a parody of it, explicitly produced for the market.

Then the study is more like an artistic anarchy set loose, an innocence is drowned, and its clear that the best no longer have convictions, while the worst are brimming with passionate intensity. If the report's intent was to publish the best insight, to feature what now tends to be denigrated as high culture, and not to succumb to the extremes of capitalism, then they have failed in great desperation.

Therefore, an elitist approach or a masscult is more or less definable by boundaries. A report that rests on smaller distinctions and deliberately projected graphs , on the other hand, respects no boundaries, and thus becomes insidious and incestuous: it incorporates and exploits the discoveries of the avant-garde, and it insinuates itself into the culture to the point of being indistinguishable from high culture.

In its capsule of a few names the Art Tactic Report reflects amply that the art market belongs to the lords of wealth who were selling thinking that they have the real McCoy. In some ways the Report also by holding on to intellectual and artistic standards, makes us wonder if  we have become what we often are accused of being, reactionary and / or anti-democratic or submissive because we have to gulp what an outsider gives us.

And yet, even now, after the latest correction with more than 38 works unsold at Sothebys's Indian Art Sale we know that there are holdouts, individuals who are determined to champion all the ideals of free market policy while, at the same time, feeling constrained to undercut the push towards mediocrity, which, due to market forces, is inevitable. It would have also been imperative in relative terms to look at the years in question and turn questions into the tricky areas like the art funds creating inflationary prices and the nascent nature of the art mart. Would Art Tactic publish an unfinished input such as this for nations on the international forefront? The merit of an investment report lies in its insight into objectivity. The sharks in the art market have the right connections! Then this report is merely an exercise in revealing a fraction of varying consequences of virtual reality.