Last evening, a friend — who is also a gallery owner — and I were sitting and talking about the visual arts and the viability of the dhanda or the business of art. Now lest you get confused, this gallery owner is a person who actually loves the art and is thankfully among the few who don’t depend on selling his works to survive. And that puts him in the category of the true patron of the arts. He does it because he loves art.
After a long discussion, we came to the conclusion that the arts are going through the throes of transition where the Indian idiom itself is in the process of re-examining its raison d’être and its context in the changed order of the new world. A world where the familiar icons of the arts have reinvented themselves so many times that now, they are struggling to just keep afloat. Every trick in the book and outside has been tried, tested, adopted or rejected and abandoned! In the race for all things global, the indigenous experience has been given the go by. With this, the baby has gone out with the bathwater and the entire logic of the arts being an indication of our times, has been hurtled into the realm of the questionable.
If lifestyles are global, then where does that leave the Indian eye view or mindscape? Isn’t this “Indian-ness” then that which keeps it all together? If the audiences’ taste is global in orientation, will it tilt the hand of the creators of the art across the arts to come up with works that are not rooted in the Indian context? What will be the shelf life of such works; will they be able to hold audience interest or will they be mere flash in the pans? Does it not mean willfully destroying all that our generation and the generation before us created and sustained and preserved?
The next concern is about patronage. Do we really need to look outwards for an audience for our arts? Can the Indian patron across the globe sustain it? There are large settlements of Indians in well-defined areas. Perhaps these areas should feature on the artists’ atlas prominently to share and disseminate information about the latest on the art map. In this day and age of the Internet, these settlements are not too far off anyway.
I feel the sensitisation needs to begin early — as early as school level. I was on the selection panel of a chain of several schools for selecting dance and art teachers this week and it touched me deeply to see how many possible performers and potential artists would end up as teachers. Many of them would shelve their own dreams to create generations of potential artists. But the seed of that “becoming an artist” once planted, germinates into a tree that refuses to get up and die so easily. Many of these teachers also become “frustrated artists” for the dreams refuse to wither away.
I have seen many an artist who have valiantly tried keeping up with the art scene and continued to participate in the mainstream, hold their shows or performances but the grist of time is such a terrible one that it doesn’t allow anyone to remain untouched by it. The years of working with children and having to simplify everything eventually takes a toll on their own work and the complexity of thought and manifestation takes flight and all that remains are dreams that one day, I too will also become a Pablo Picasso…

Alka Raghuvanshi is an art writer, curator and artist and can be contacted on alkaraghuvanshi@yahoo.com