Art in the Capitalist World

‘Art’ and ‘market’ was never discussed so much within and outside the art circles. Traditionally art survived on ‘patronage’ of the ruling and the elite class? Today the whole concept of art making, display, circulation, and collecting has changed. Today value to art comes through so many factors; the major factors being financial, intellectual, historical and cultural. We explored the major art galleries in Delhi and NCR, the unknown and the famous artists, and the small villages of Madhubani and Darbhanga, the centres of the world famous MITHILA Painting. We talked to the people behind these galleries which pump millions and those artist who have created their mark with nothing but their skills.

There has been a noticeable expansion in the realm of art over last couple of years in India.
There has been a rise in the number of art fairs and biennales hosted across the globe in the last 7-8 years. They have created an altogether new platform for art to circulate and be sold. Indian artists and gallery’s participation has also grown steadily in these years.

With marketing came brand building; something never related to art. But with the emergence of a global art market, brand value pervades the field. New experiments, sensationalism and use of technology accompany an exponential rise in art price around the world. The proliferation of private galleries and auction homes within India points to a strong domestic as well as an international market. But the market is again only for those who have enough to do business. We tried to find people who search for a balance between monetary and artistic goals.

Since 2000 the art market has seen a steep rise. Contemporary art from India has gone global. The art fund, which is primarily concerned with art for its investment value has witnessed boom right till before the recession fears and the Lehman. The momentum generated during boom time is still pushing branded art galleries and the artists who became famous. But with business and marketing at the core of almost all these art galleries, the purpose of art as a medium to make man aware of his unconscious has taken a back seat in many cases.

The search might never be over. The search for purpose might be said to be biased one way or the other, but the art comes out of the creator in us. And a creator will create but with a purpose. What differentiates one from the other is the holiness, the impersonality, the purposefulness of the purpose.

However, how have all these shifts in the art world in general have and Indian art world in particular affected art? Does the expansion of the viewership effects an artist’s response towards audiences? In what way has the need to stand out impacted? In short, what has globalization brought to art?

Kavita Singh, Associate Professor, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, writes, “Questions as large as these cannot be answered. One might even say that they should not be answered; the questions are more productive as they open up lines of inquiry that facile answers would foreclose. But these questions are certainly worth asking today as contemporary art from India is seen and sought elsewhere on the globe. Yet at home it remains at best confined, to a small audience of artists and art professionals, or less congenially, is ‘branded’ as an investment opportunity and traded as such; or at worst, is alienated, derided or under attack.”

The use of what Kavita calls ‘shock-aesthetics’, is the new phenomenon, to startle viewers into some form of response; raise consciousness about social issues; or to turn into a desirable commodity, or to resist commodification or anything else is the thing being tried the most these days.

Every age will have its art. Ours is not an exception. The art coming up these days has its own purpose. Simultaneously exists the struggle of traditional arts to be modern, to be relevant contemporarily. The efforts to create brand should not blind the creator.

Let us hope that the fundamentals of art will always remain the same.