Indian art’s bumpy ride in the market

By By Gareth Harris. Source : Financial Times
Art has only one language. Even if you don’t understand the content, you should at least be able to say, ‘My God, this is a good piece,’” asserts Subodh Gupta, who passes me one of a series of mangoes strewn around his Delhi studio. But the fruits aren’t for ingestion; the solid bronze pieces are a sculptural Dutch 17th-century still life, their “skins” dappled with subtly delineated blemishes.
The mangoes will go on show in an exhibition of new works by the Indian artist at Hauser & Wirth in London in October, the artist’s first UK solo show, alongside other impressive sculptural creations such as a reworking in bronze of Marcel Duchamp’s moustachioed Mona Lisa, a 7ft-wide stainless steel thali plate, two 9ft spoons and a set of cast Jeff Koons “Puppy” gift boxes.
This nod to a fellow art market darling (“I will never ignore Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, they have given so much strength to young artists worldwide”) is another canny move on the part of Gupta, 45, who is acknowledged as India’s first contemporary art superstar. The Bihar-born artist, who started as a painter in the 1980s before branching into installation and video, has led the South Asian contemporary art boom with his towering sculptures crafted from tiffin food pots, milk pails and cow-dung patties. “My family works on the railways. I remember taking food to my dad in a tiffin,” says Gupta, devouring lunch.
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Second India Art Summit Sees Overwhelming Attendance, Modest Sales

By Bharati Chaturvedi. Source : ArtInfo
The second India Art Summit in Delhi turned out to be an extraordinary event. With 54 mostly Indian galleries showing both new and favorite artists, a sculpture park, and several side events, it became more than just a standard art fair.
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Indian Art Summit 2009: An 'arty' delight

by Srishti Jha. Source : Hindustan Times
In the recent times the art market was affected by the much talked about global meltdown. But now Indian art is getting back on rails. Amid the speculations and manipulations going on, the by and large feedback is that the real art and artists will continue to exist and attain greater heights. The second thriving Indian art summit has proved it. The Indian art summit 2009 had an immense response. Admits Neha Kirpal, Associate Director, Indian Art Summit, "I think whosoever took part in the summit had an awe-inspiring experience. We started with around 20,000 people working for us and by the end it was double in number. Commercially also we did very well as we had huge amount of sales. We again have had an outstanding response as we had last year."
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Seeing Red Dots

By Vandana Kalra. Source : Express India
When the gates closed at the India Art Summit on Sunday evening, the cash box was still ringing, the red dots were still going up and the smiles were getting wider. “Around 250 artwork have sold for a total value of around Rs 26 crore by exhibiting galleries. The total value of the artwork on display was around Rs 40-50 lakh,” said a beaming Neha Kirpal, associate director of the Summit. Business at the 2009 Summit was thus more than double of last year’s Rs 10 crore figure.
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Painted with passion

By Kapil Chopra. Source :The Telegraph
Let me talk about some art initiatives and how some people in our country are trying their best to promote Contemporary art which will make the genre all the more sought after in years to come. A lot of private individuals are doing their bit by taking private initiatives to further the cause of Contemporary art.
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It’s important to educate clients on how the art market works

Despite the rise and the subsequent fall in the Indian art market, there is still room for continued growth
By Anindita Ghose. Source LiveMint and The Wall Street Journal
Anders Petterson, founder and managing director of the UK-based art market research company ArtTactic, is in the city to attend the four-day India Art Summit 2009, which started on Wednesday. With a background in financial analysis, Petterson founded ArtTactic in 2001, responding to increasing interest in art market research and commentary. Petterson and his team use analytical frameworks similar to those used by financial markets to present statistical data for art markets in order to enable prudent investment.
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Summit brings affordable art to city

By Neelam Raj. Source : The Times of India
The curators have come, collectors stalk the aisles and there's loads and loads of art. Welcome to the India Art Summit which opened in the capital on Wednesday. Only in its second edition, the four-day event has put Delhi on the global art map. It's unlikely you will ever see such a wide sampling of work under one roof. So if you're heading to Pragati Maidan, here's a short guide that will make your art outing easier.
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Rural Art Gets Respect at Two Mumbai Exhibits

By Kavitha Rao. Source : The New York Times



Bhuri Baï, acrylic on paper, 2003, private collection, Paris.

Art lovers in Mumbai can get a glimpse of a rarely seen contemporary art form at two galleries this month: work from rural or tribal areas of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. In addition to showcasing these artists, the exhibits raise an interesting debate: some resent the easy labeling of rural artists as” folk” or “tribal,” arguing that such categories pigeonhole artists and prevent them from getting the respect they deserve. “We have to look beyond the tribal label,” said Khorshed Pundole of the Pundole Art Gallery, who has been collecting these artists along with her husband and co-owner Dadiba Pundole over the last five years, said. “Their concerns are the same as ours: global warming, pollution, the destruction of ecosystems.” In recent years, contemporary non-metropolitan artists (the clumsy but preferred term for the artists formerly known as “folk”) have attracted interest at art fairs, though art critics say they are still immensely undervalued.
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The art of recovery in a slow market

By Arati Menon Carroll. Source : The Economic Times
You know times are hard when the usually circumspect representatives of the Indian art market speak out of their combined pains. Until recently, they struggled to accept the arrival of a slump in the market, ostrich-like even as world over bellwether auctions registered tepid bidding and pivotal art fairs saw poor attendance. However, at a recently held panel discussion in Mumbai on ‘Growth strategies for a recovering art market,’ two points were driven home: that the Indian art market is not out of the woods yet and that passiveness is unacceptable.
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The gods of art are here

By Kishore Singh. Source : Business Standard
India's largest art show will open next week on an unprecedented scale, amidst hope and optimism.
This, the ultimate outing for Indian art lovers, is a wet dream of possibilities and realities — the best that India has to offer, on an unprecedented scale, ranging from the pre-moderns to the very cutting-edge of contemporary art, wielding a swathe across geographies to include Afghan and Bangladeshi artists, European and Asian and India-born creators, from gigantic works to small formats, across a dizzying range of mediums, with the buzz but also the mayhem of a disturbed hornet’s nest. In the days leading up to the second edition of the Indian Art Summit, from August 19-22 at New Delhi’s Pragati Maidan, the ancillary industry has seen the kind of action it had become unused to — designers are being hired to style the galleries, framers are doing double shifts to complete assignments, customs officials are being harangued to clear artworks, catalogues are being prepared, printers are matching images with offset reproductions, price lists are being readied (with hope, cross those fingers!), even cranes hired…
…for what else can be used to shift the 890-kilo, gigantic Navjot sculpture that will be placed in the Sculpture Park by Delhi Art Gallery? Where, no doubt, it will keep company with another huge sculpture of a Dalmatian by who else but that irreverent humorist and sculptor Ved Gupta (courtesy Gallery Threshold). This is the first time India has seen such excitement with regard to sculpture, and who can blame us: Haven’t we, finally, got Britain’s Anish Kapoor (Lisson) to take a bow and send us his work, a nod to the country of his birth. Of course, you’ll find sculpture — plenty of it — in the stalls too, but in the Park, expect surprises, for this is the first time a range of artists and galleries are coming together to assemble and dissemble without barriers, so subjects can vary from the ludicrous to the intense — such as “ambitious sculptures by Shanti Swaroopini”, promises Threshold’s Tunty Chauhan, or Vibha Galotra’s “lovely installation of five buildings of fabric, wire, paper,” says Galerie Espace’s Renu Modi, “you go up and down, up and down…”.
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What's in a name ?

by Ranjit Hoskote. Source : LiveMint and The Wall Street Journal
Misname an art form and you consign its exponents to decades, sometimes centuries, of condescension and indifference. Two exhibitions opening in Mumbai this fortnight may help undo the damage deliberate acts of misnaming and misinterpretation have done to contemporary art that is produced by artists who happen to be of tribal or more broadly rural background.
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