In the Fakers’ Paradise

“I know that I cannot get your works. When buyers ask me to get your works, I tell them plainly that I don’t have your works and I give them the works of those young artists who try to imitate your style.”

This piece of frank statement comes from a Delhi based gallerist (don’t waste your time and energy in finding out who it could be) and he was talking to Manjunath Kamath, an artist with steadily growing reputation.

“This guy was naïve enough to tell me this. He must be thinking that his confession would make me sympathetic towards him and I would give him some works to save the situation. But I will not do that. This is an interesting scenario. If I use Himmat Shah’s comment, ‘sab log andhon ke beech mein aayina bech raha hai’ (They are selling mirrors amongst the blind),” Manjunath smiles.

Fakers’ paradise is what Indian contemporary art scene has become. The regular appearance of fakes in the art market ruffles a few feathers and raises the barometer of passion for a while. Once the moral-ethical issues vis-à-vis faking, are discussed, clinically analyzed and a few solutions are flaunted, everyone goes back to the safer havens. Fakes still do the rounds and these mirrors are well sold amongst the blinds.

Perhaps, faking is an inevitable by-product of any consumer market. When the demand-supply ratio does not show any sign of balancing and the prices of the ‘originals’ go up right through the roof, fakers take positions and shoot.

I use the phrase ‘taking position’ deliberately. It is a militaristic and confrontational term. If I take the liberty to replace the word ‘faking’ with ‘piracy’, things could be better explained. Piracy, in our times, denotes counter culture, hence a culture in itself. Pirates create a market of their own within the mainstream market and flourish there, without losing their identity as pirates. Piracy becomes a legitimized practice when the products of it are co-opted by the mainstream market.

Unfortunately, in the contemporary Indian art market, piracy is not about taking theoretical positions, nor does it presume a counter culture of sorts. What does it do then? It remains in the realm of faking and aspire to be passed off as ‘originals’. Fakers and the promoters of fake art aim at only one thing—infiltrate (the market) and naturalize for monetary gains.

Unlike love and war, business has an inbuilt structure of ethics; at times this structure is fluid and other times quite concrete. Business is a social contract made for exchanging goods and values. Those who enter in this contract are meant to respect the unsaid and unwritten codes of ethics, and also are meant to co-operate to derive maximum satisfaction. When a fake is exchanged for real money, there occurs a breach of contract, though the faker gets more satisfaction as the giver of real money does not come to know that he is duped. If it happens in a chain of exchanges, as game theory says, it is bound to break at some point of time, leaving both the parties in contract dissatisfied.

Faking a work of art and exchanging it for original in the real market, is almost like faking an orgasm in the commercial exchange of sex. The faker here fakes orgasm in order to satisfy the customer and unlike in art business, most of the times, the real money giver knows that his/her partner is faking it. Both the parties reach some kind of satisfaction point as one is supplied with money and the other is supplied with ‘happiness’ or ‘reiteration of virility’ etc.

Art business is not commercial sex work. But when the faker and the promoter of the faker fake ‘orgasm’ and deny the giver of real money a chance to know that the ‘orgasm’ is fake, then it amounts to prostitution without its basic ethics, that is giving mutual pleasure on consent.

Faking is rampant in Indian contemporary art and it does not limit itself to copying an established artist’s works and passing it off. We have now artists who work exactly like established masters but conveniently (and ethically, I should say) sign them with their own names. We have artists (especially several youngsters) who do ‘originals’ but force the viewer to classify them along with mid-career artists thanks to the stylistic affinities. (Stylistic affinity could be an easy way for recognition and for getting elevated to the intellectual plane of the established mid-career artists, without much brain jogging). We have artists who deliberately do incoherent works of installations and multi-media art (cutting edge art, for a change) for the simple reason that it looks trendy and might bring some attention. We have artists who keeping talking about displacement and dislocation without understanding the head or tail of these grave theoretical concerns.

We have publications that look authentic but in close scrutiny reveal that they are dictionaries stirred up well in a mixer-grinder. We have art dealers who keep looking at auction results and praise a yesterday’s embarrassments to skies. We have auctions well planned and ‘fixed’ so that artists suffering from the consistent erosion of grey matter look ‘world class masters’. We have ‘international galleries and shows’ of Indian contemporary art every other day with no commendable consequences. We have art critics who read in French and write in English. Yet another lot needs at least three hefty volumes to stand on and see a simple work of art which portrays a monkey eating banana and say that it is a ‘Foucauldian monkey eating a Derridian Banana.’ We have art history departments that prepare students to become art gallery assistants. We have institutions, where students learn how to get foreign scholarships so that they can go to University of California and do research on subjects like ‘Representation of Burden of Beasts in Indian Contemporary Art with special reference to the works of G.R.Iranna, Manjunath Kamath and Jagannath Panda.’ (And these three artists live and work in Delhi). We have curators constantly finding inspiration from Kamasutra, Shilpa Texts etc and trying to connect it with cutting edge art. We have curators operating in the ‘international circuit’ of cutting edge art and worry about restoring a Paresh Maity work in their personal collection. We have galleries constantly looking for ‘young artists’ and dumping many from the existing camp unscrupulously.

I would not say that all these are about faking art. But I would assert that all these are symptoms of a faking art scene and culture. And these symptoms, I feel, if not addressed and removed, would cloud the sincerity of our contemporary culture, which has all the potential to be the best in the world. These symptoms, if not weeded out in due course of time, would even prove detrimental in establishing a culture of piracy, which should obviously flourish along with the mainstream culture and pave way for a counter culture.

Before closing, I would like to recount an incident- a kind of an encounter with fakes.

Two years back, a Delhi based art collector took me to her home and showed the ‘fabulous’ collection she had. She really had a lot of works on her walls as well as in her store. She conducted me through the works and I was excited to see several works of M.F.Husain, K.G.Subramanyan, Manjit Bawa, Arpana Caur, Jogen Choudhury and so on. But a kind of uneasiness started creeping all over me as I found all those works had mismatching signatures. She was nonchalant. “These are all very good artists doing very well in the market,” she said.

Which is that market?

Have we all gone blind? No is the answer. Some are watching, that’s why those fakes didn’t have any takers. I want to add something to what Manjunath has said- “Not every one is blind here but some are faking blindness as it is the safe thing to do in a blind land. May be none is blind here, everyone thinks that the others are blind so it is better to fake blindness.”

These are the games Indians play.

PS: Paraphrasing or copying without acknowledging the source is plagiarism. Plagiarism with acknowledgement is research.