Van Gogh Work Trails Estimate at $1.2 Million India Art Auction

Source Business Week by Pratish Narayanan
The first auction of western art in India by a Mumbai-based company fetched $1.2 million, trailing forecasts, as fewer than half the works found buyers and a Vincent Van Gogh painting sold below its estimated price. “L’Allee aux deux promeneurs” (Lane With Two Figures), an early landscape by the largely self-taught artist, sold for $697,000, failing to meet an estimate of $800,000 to $1 million.
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Keep on Truckin’

Source Tehelka by Shone Sathish Babu
Robert Crumb’s cult began in the flower-power 60s, where his iconic imagery became one of the cornerstones of that era’s movement. He’s the founder of Zap Comix, and created characters such as Fritz the Cat, and remains a controversial figure because of his sexist, often misogynist depiction of women. He’s in Delhi for the 2nd Comic Con India Festival.
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Young at art

Source Business Today by Anumeha Chaturvedi
Mumbai-based architect Ashish Shah, 32, started collecting artworks when he was in school, and has not re-sold any. His house is designed around works by Sudarshan Shetty, S. H. Raza and Shilpa Gupta. Regardless of the motive, there is no doubt that art buyers are getting younger. Consider the statistics from the recent India Art Fair in New Delhi. "Of the sales, about 40 per cent were generated by those investing in art for the first time," says Neha Kirpal, the fair's founder and organiser.
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Des Versets toujours sataniques

Source La Presse par Laura-Julie Perreault
C'est à l'invitation du Festival de littérature de Jaipur, le plus grand d'Asie, que Salman Rushdie devait visiter l'Inde cette semaine. M. Rushdie a participé en 2007 à l'important événement, qui recevait aussi cette année Oprah Winfrey. Il y a deux semaines, des groupes musulmans ont lancé une campagne contre Salman Rushdie, affirmant que les Versets sataniques «insultent le prophète Mahomet et les musulmans». Cette opinion ne fait cependant pas l'unanimité dans l'immense minorité musulmane indienne (plus de 150 millions de personnes). Un des plus éminents théologiens musulmans de l'Inde, Maulana Wahiddudin Khan, a qualifié les menaces contre Rushdie de «non islamiques et d'étrangères à la constitution indienne laïque».
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Two museums show Native American art, then and now

Source The Boston Globe by Sebastian Smee
Two of the most thrilling shows you are likely to see this year, both devoted to Native American art, are showing concurrently in New England. Both are filled with astounding and beautiful things. Both have been mounted at institutions that, boasting long relationships with Native American art, have collected it in depth. Both are underpinned by the expertise and personal voices of Native Americans. And both will take your imagination to places it may never have expected to go.
What is Native American art?
How long have you got? The category’s central paradox - and it’s a bitter one - is that a people whose diverse cultures were subject to centuries of systematic, government-sanctioned destruction over several centuries are now, in the field of culture, expected to conform to definitions of “authenticity’’ that are, for the most part, impossible to meet.
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India to Have Its First Biennale (Fingers Crossed)

Source The Wall Street Journal by Margherita Stancati
If town twinning is still a done thing, a few months down the line someone may want to place a request to twin Venice and Kochi. Consider the following: both are port towns that made their fortunes in the spice trade and both, to different extents, sit on networks of canals. That, by itself, makes for a pretty good match. And soonish, if all goes to plan, Kochi will have its own art biennale, too. The start date has been set: a prophetic 12/12/12. That’s when the city in India’s southern state of Kerala is set to host a three-month long exhibition of Indian and international contemporary art.
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A Parity Gap for Women in Indian Art

Source The New York Times by Nilanjana S. Roy
“When you look at the distance we’ve come over the last few decades,” Mr. Singh said, “you might argue that the art world has been getting more equal, on all fronts. Even with pricing, perhaps it’s catching up. Eventually it has to happen, as art becomes more democratized and as people concentrate less on the signature and more on the artwork.” And perhaps, he said, the international art market might inadvertently contribute to gender-blind pricing in the Indian art world. “A buyer or a collector abroad can’t tell from the names whether an artist is a man or a woman,” Mr. Singh said. “With Indian art becoming more international, that might actually work better for women.”
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Deer dump art sells for Rs.10 lakh at India Art Fair

Source India Today by Georgina Maddox
In what was a major triumph for the artist and no less remarkable a victory for the art world at large, an unusual sculpture by Faridabadbased Shine Shivan, titled Sex Fumes and made of - brace yourself - deer faeces was sold for a whopping Rs.10 lakh on the third day of the India Art Fair. It was brought to the exposition by Mumbai's Gallery Maskara. Shivan said an exorbitant bid was the last thing on his mind when he first set out to build his piece de resistance. It was in fact a psychological trap that he was caught in where he could not stop collecting the mounds of deer faeces around the Aravali Hills on the outskirts of Faridabad.
"I was fascinated by how the deer continued to shit in the same place every day to mark its territory and announce the presence of a dominant male. Furthermore, the female, when she had chosen which male she wanted, would go and defecate on top of the mound of the chosen one," Shivan said.
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Bilan contrasté pour le salon India Art Fair à Delhi

Source Le Quotidien de l'Art par Roxana Azimi
Le salon India Art Fair, qui a fermé ses portes hier soir à Delhi, a connu des résultats mélangés. Certains exposants ont fait florès, en tout premier lieu les grosses galeries indiennes qui jouent à domicile. La galerie SKE, de Bangalore, a ainsi fait feu de tout bois avec des pièces de Sudarshan Shetty, Navin Thomas, ou encore Shilpa Gupta. « C’est la première fois que les jeunes artistes que nous montrons se sont vendus aussi vite », confie Sunitha Kumar Emmart, directrice de la galerie. La Londonienne Grosvenor s’est pour sa part défaite de trois œuvres de Souza et d’une pièce de Husain. De son côté, le spécialiste parisien en art tribal indien Hervé Perdriolle a cédé en un jour la moitié de son stand. Plus surprenant, la galerie Continua (San Gimignano, Pékin, le Moulin) a vendu à un collectionneur de Bombay une pièce de Daniel Buren (1970), dont il exigeait 220 000 euros.
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At Yoko’s Show, Funeral Pyres and Tributes to Mommy

Source The New York Times by Malavika Vyawahare
Yoko Ono’s first exhibition in India, called “Our Beautiful Daughters,” at the Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi, could also be called “Art Under Construction.” All seven exhibits in the show, which opened Thursday night, ask the spectators to participate in them. “Remember Us” on the first floor is the special installation Ms. Ono made for India, consisting of a large, dimly lit room with casts of beheaded, dismembered women’s bodies of different ages laid on pyrelike platforms. Small containers of ash at one end of the room seem to invite viewers to rub it on themselves or the bodies. At the end of the day, the bodies are covered with traditionally embroidered cloth made by Indian artisans – an important part of the art installation.
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The buying game

Source Financial Times by Rachel Spence
To be launched this month in Delhi, the India Art Fair Collectors’ Circle aims both to enlarge and educate the country’s cadre of potential Saatchis. The scheme was the brainchild of fair director Neha Kirpal, and its seeds were sown as she observed the success of her venture. Now in its fourth year, the fair has seen numbers multiply more than ten times since its first edition welcomed 10,000 visitors. (Last year the 84 galleries were visited by 138,000 people, equivalent to Frieze and Miami Basel combined.)
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Art Stage Singapore marque des points

Source Connaissance des Arts par Guy Boyer
Dans la bataille des grandes foires d’art contemporain en Asie, Art Stage Singapore vient de marquer de nouveaux points pour sa deuxième édition (du 12 au 15 janvier).
Face à ses rivales de Shangaï et de Hong-Kong, cette foire dirigée par l'inusable Lorenzo Rudolf, a su jouer de la position stratégique de Singapour au coeur de l'Asie du Sud-Est et entre la Malaisie et l'Indonésie, de ses atours économiques (cette ville-état est le siège de nombreuses banques privées, son port franc très actif est superbement adapté aux discrétions du marché de l'art) et est impliqué dans les nouveaux chantiers du gouvernement (résidences d'artistes et centre d'art dans les futurs Gillman Barracks pour mi-2012, Biennale de Singapour en 2013, nouvelle National Gallery of Art pour l'art moderne et contemporain installée avec l'aide du Studio Milou dans le City Hall et la Supreme Court en 2015).
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Art gains from commerce

Source Times of India
In India, exhibitions and fairs have taken art out of museums and to the masses. Breaking down barriers between 'high' and 'low' art, such events have popularised art among the general public. Once seen as esoteric, the art world's being opened up and democratised. The culture of acquiring artwork too is no longer limited to the privileged few. Moreover, even tribal art and artisanal traditions have gained from the push of commercialisation, which has brought them to the attention of appreciative buyers. Why, then, view art and commerce as mutually exclusive?
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Andaman Islands tribe threatened by lure of mass tourism

Source The Guardian by Gethin Chamberlain

"Dance," the policeman instructed. The girls in front of him, naked from the waist up, obeyed. A tourist's camera panned round to another young woman, also naked and awkwardly holding a bag of grain in front of her. "Dance for me," the policeman commanded.
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Les quadras sortent l'art aborigène du ghetto

Source Le Monde par Marie-Morgane Le Moël
Le succès de Bangarra est symptomatique d'un changement en Australie. Les artistes aborigènes s'imposent dans le monde des arts, naguère réservé à une élite blanche et souvent grisonnante. Ils proposent une vision urbaine, actuelle. Stephen Page fait partie d'une génération de quadras qui fait bouger les lignes, forte d'une double culture (origines aborigènes, formation occidentale) qui lui permet de s'affirmer dans le milieu artistique. " Mes parents n'avaient pas le droit de conserver leur culture. Notre génération retrouve sa fierté. Espérons que la prochaine connaîtra son identité de façon évidente ", commente le chorégraphe. " Mes parents devaient se battre pour avoir le droit de vote, alors que ma génération a eu accès à l'université. Notre objectif est de préserver notre culture, nos histoires, mais avec notre identité d'artistes contemporains ", explique-t-il.
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India Art Fair "des racines et des ailes"

Dans le prolongement de l'exposition (M)other India à la galerie du Jour / Agnès B. (sept-oct 2011), le double stand ouvert de la Gallery Maskara (Mumbai) et de la Galerie Hervé Perdriolle (Paris) pour l'Indian Art Fair 2012 développe la pensée du grand peintre moderne indien, Jagdish Swaminathan, en proposant un dialogue entre les artistes contemporains issus des cultures globales et locales.

India Art Fair 25-29 Janvier 2012 New Delhi lien > catalogue online
Gallery Maskara (Stand C7) et Galerie Hervé Perdriolle (Stand C9)

India Art Fair "from roots to wings"

After co-curating the exhibition (M)other India at Galerie du Jour, Agnès B. in Paris (Sept-Oct 2011) Hervé Perdriolle and Abhay Maskara are continuing the dialogue in New Delhi at the Indian Art Fair 2012. The adjoining booths of Gallery Maskara and Gallery Hervé Perdriolle will develop the thought of Jagdish Swaminathan, the renowned modern painter, theorist and founder of Bharat Bhavan museum who initiated the dialogue between Indian contemporary artists from different origins - urban and rural.
India Art Fair 25-29 Janvier 2012 New Delhi link > catalogue online
Gallery Maskara (Booth C7) and Galerie Hervé Perdriolle (Booth C9)

The Rockefeller Raza

Source The New York Times by Carol Vogel
Mrs. Rockefeller bought “Village With Church” at the Graham Gallery in New York in 1959, and it remained in the family until 1994, when it was sold to an unidentified collector at auction for $4,025, according to Christie’s. That buyer made a savvy investment: The semi-abstract landscape, with a dark blue-black background punctuated by strong reds, whites and yellows — painted while the artist was living in Europe, where he was heavily influenced by Modern masters like Cézanne and van Gogh — is expected to fetch $1.5 million to $2.5 million at Sotheby’s auction. “The Rockefellers spent much time in India and were passionate about promoting Indian art in America,” said Henry Howard-Sneyd, Sotheby’s vice chairman for Asian art, “So the painting does have a certain historical significance.”
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Dar-al-Ma'mûn, une vision éthique du luxe

Source Le Quotidien de l'Art par Emmanuelle Lequeux
À quelques kilomètres de Marrakech, dans la vallée de l’Ourika, au Maroc, une petite utopie se met en place. Elle s’appelle Dar al-Ma’mûn, du nom d’un calife astronome abbasside ; regarder les étoiles n’y est pas la moindre des occupations. Le principe en est simple et novateur : autour de l’hôtel Fellah, ouvert fin 2011 et porté par une vision éthique du « luxe, calme et volupté », une résidence d’artistes est installée depuis un an et demi. Cela pourrait n’être qu’un énième boutique hôtel zen, sans la personnalité de son créateur, le français d’origine algérienne Redha Moali, ancien trader lassé du monde de la finance. En 2013, un centre d’art de 4 000 m2 viendra enrichir la proposition. « Nous ne nous contentons pas d’aider les agriculteurs locaux ou de collaborer avec les artisans du coin, nous voulons repenser la manière de financer la culture, analyse Julien Amicel, qui s’occupe ici des résidences. Pour nous la culture n’est pas un centre de coûts, mais un investissement nécessaire, qui a une rentabilité indirecte."
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Inde: Dharavi, le bidonville qui vaut des millions

Source RFI par Sébastien Farcis
Vu de haut, Dharavi n’est qu’un interminable alignement anarchique de petites maisons aux toits en tôle. Mais à hauteur d’homme, les ruelles étroites de ce bidonville regorgent d’une activité débordante et inépuisable : depuis la confection textile ou de poterie en passant par le recyclage du plastique de Bombay, le décor vivant du film Slumdog Millionnaire est une gigantesque usine informelle, qui génère une activité d’environ 500 millions d’euros par an. Mais ce modèle unique pourrait bientôt prendre fin, rattrapé par l’expansion d’une ville en manque d’espace, et un plan de réaménagement pharaonique.
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