I simply love Bollywood for coining some of the most appropriate catch phases or stories that are so apt, that the brightest poets and litterateurs couldn’t have thought of a better word or tale. I am referring to the popular line “It happens only in India.”
I am no longer shocked at what happens on the Indian art scene, as I have seen it happen once too often. However, what amazes me is the artless way in which art situations are handled, and what is more amazing is that there seem to be no one who either understands the what and the why of the given situation or is unwilling to anything about it.
It is my belief that since the quantum of patronage to artists — performing or visual — is really speaking the thin edge of the wedge, there is so much inter-personal strife that its like a snake farm at best and crab fest at worst. Given the high profile of artists, no one is willing to bell the cat.
Absence of an art cadre has compounded administrative problems. Political appointments like chairpersons of the three Akademis — Sangeet Natak Akademi, Lalit Kala Akademi (LKA) and Sahitya Akademi have to be made on popular profiles rather than appropriateness.
This business of handing over art institutions to artists is fraught with its own set of problems. Remember what happened to Bharat Bhawan? Artists mostly make terrible administrators, but far more damaging are wily administrators in the garb of friends of the arts and artists. A case in point is the LKA. The happenings at the Akademi are an investigator’s delight.
The institution makes history by participating in the Venice Biennale, but the secretary gets sacked, without even a showcause notice for not holding the triennial in India. This is despite good intent shown by the LKA in re-hiring the erstwhile director of the triennial, but who in turn slapped a flimsy case on the LKA and lost. Whatever happened to natural justice? The arbitrarily chosen curator of the Indian section of the Venice Biennale gets appointed to the Raza Foundation. The managing trustee of the Raza Foundation and LKA chairman are the same person. Ah, the delight of the jigsaw puzzle!
The LKA allows a private collector to pool in money in a publication on Manjit Bawa to put in an additional 26 pages, by way of which he validates and gets a provenance for his works. I wonder who vouched that those were actually Manjit's works? It happens only in India that the LKA assigns French film maker Lauren Begat, who is also Akbar Padamsee’s son-in-law, to make five films for `20 lakh each, paid in foreign currency, leaving Indian filmmakers bristling. The head reels!
During the Commonwealth Games, while Suresh Kalmadi was doing his own jig, the LKA was too busy playing its own games.
Private galleries and the curator, chosen in an inky-pinky-ponky manner, were invited to show their wares at the LKA galleries on the promise that they would pay `3 lakhs each towards an artists' aid fund and hold an auction.
When there were negligible sales at the show, these galleries were reluctant to pay up. And no auction took place.
It happens only in India that a poet, litterateur with no visual art expertise gets appointed to the highest position of chairman of the LKA.
Incidentally, he happens to be the same person, whose reports were so negative, that he was among the very few bureaucrats, who was given a send off without even making it to the additional secretary rank.
The same government who thought him unworthy of even additional secretaryship, appointed him as the vice-chancellor of the Mahatma Gandhi University in Wardha. His capabilities are so amazing that he was able to run the entire university sitting right here in New Delhi! In both positions, enquiries had been allegedly instituted against his misdeeds. And then miraculously he became the chairman of the LKA. Surely the art scene is not so lawaaris, that no one is bothered about these facts? If this is not hotter than Vidya Balan in her famous red saree, tell me what is?
Alka Raghuvanshi is an art writer, curator and artist