Britain, India working to conserve culture

Source Hindustan Times
India's culture ministry and the British Museum are working closely to conserve Indian art, architecture and traditional textiles, says director of the museum Neil MscGregor.
He is part of the British cultural delegation touring India with Prime Minister David Cameron. “We will host three separate workshops for the conservation of archaeological material in Kerala later this year by bringing teams of British and Indian scholars to discuss the best conservation methods. We recently invited Indian experts to work in the British museum to conserve painted textiles,” MscGregor told th news agency on Wednesday while visiting an art gallery in Connaught Place.
MscGregor, who has been the director of British Museum since 2002, said: "The museum's collaboration with India has four strands in four different spheres. The British Museum has embarked on a big project to document the changing tribal culture in Arunachal Pradesh. It is spread over a period of 20 years."
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David Cameron lance une offensive de charme en Inde

Source Aujourd'hui l'Inde par Naseed Chand (AFP)
Deux géants britanniques, BAE Systems et Rolls-Royce, ont annoncé la signature d'un contrat cumulé de 1,09 milliard de dollars pour 57 nouveaux avions de chasse d'entraînement Hawk destinés à l'armée indienne lors du premier jour de la visite de David Cameron en Inde.
"Je veux que ces relations entraînent une hausse de la croissance économique et une baisse de nos chiffres du chômage", a déclaré le Premier ministre lors d'un discours à Bangalore (sud), vitrine de l'industrie high-tech indienne. "Ceci est une mission pour le commerce, oui, mais je préfère la voir comme une mission pour l'emploi", a-t-il ajouté.
Témoignant de l'importance accordée à cette visite de deux jours, M. Cameron est arrivé mardi soir accompagné d'une délégation de ministres et hommes d'affaires, notamment le chancelier de l'Echiquier George Osborne.
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Are soaring art prices creating another bubble?

Source The Economic Times by Sharmistha Ray
Unarguably, the major auction houses have injected the much-needed optimism back into the art market, which was looking listless even at the start of the year. The highly successful model of art auctions as mini-theatre fabricated by Christie’s and Sotheby’s and adapted by India’s Saffronart to its online platform is hugely entertaining and it delivers results. Art history has never been more compelling. The story is one of desire; of promise and regret on a battlefield of gigantic egos coupled with huge sums of money. The art works that line the walls like rarefied gems are the auctioneer’s willing props.
Together, with an avid audience of affluent buyers, they overture history . Records are shattered one after the other. The press offices declare even minor records as major victories; forget about the past is what they want to tell us. It’s good times again; we can blindly roll about in the hay and enjoy the glorious sunshine. But even Shakespeare, the greatest dramatist of all, would remind us that the difference between comedy and tragedy is a tightrope walk ten thousand feet off the ground.
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Tagore: it's for my pictures to express and not to explain

Source The Hindu by Ananya Dutta
The 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore has triggered a deluge of cultural events and exhibitions worldwide. The sesquicentennial year has also been marked with coincidental events, indicating a flush of interest in his paintings and graphical adventures.
For all Tagore's fame as a poet, novelist, musician, playwright and philosopher, it was an exhibition of the paintings of the “accidental artist,” opened by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on May 9, that set the ball rolling for the series of cultural events planned by the government of India.
This was immediately followed by the announcement that 12 paintings of Tagore would go under the hammer as a part of Sotheby's annual auction of Indian art. The auctioneers described them as “arguably the most important group of works by Tagore ever to appear at an auction.”
The news triggered protests from art lovers in India, who demanded that the priceless works be acquired by the government. West Bengal Chief Minster Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee wrote to Dr. Singh, urging him to intervene. But the efforts of the Ministry of Culture did not bear fruit, and the paintings were sold for £1.5 million, three times the estimated price. While it was Tagore's writings and songs that catapulted him to international fame, the Nobel Laureate believed that it was his art that allowed him to communicate with a universal audience.
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Sculpting stories

Source The Hindu by Shailaja Tripathi
Rarely do any private galleries in the Capital play host to our exquisite indigenous art and craft, for that's considered to be the domain of state-owned museums and galleries. And in this context the ongoing show of sculptures “Dog Father, Fox Mother, Their Mother and Other Stories” at a contemporary space like W+K Exp (Wieden+Kennedy Experience), the art gallery owned by W+K Delhi, a creative agency, can justifiably be called an aberration.
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Rashid Rana at the Musée Guimet

Source The Telegraph by Gareth Harris
A quiet revolution took place in the French museum world this week. Over 20 works by leading Pakistani artist Rashid Rana went on show at the venerable Musée Guimet, France’s national museum of Asian art (‘Perpetual Paradoxes’, until 15 November).
For the first time, contemporary works have been integrated into the museum’s permanent collections with Rana’s striking digital photomontages and sculptures, dating from 1992 to today, placed alongside ancient Buddha statuettes and effigies of revered deities over two floors.
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Bharti Kher: the contemporary Indian artist

Source Wonder Woman by Archana
Gurgaon-based Bharti Kher has become the most valued contemporary Indian woman artist. An elephant that she made with fibreglass and bindis has notched up Rs 6.94 crore at the Sotheby's Contemporary Art Evening in London on June 27, 2010.
At the same auction, ironically, Kher's husband Subodh Gupta, who's a pro at setting auction records, scored a blank. His pots-andpans installation remained unsold.
Kher's installation of the elephant lying prone on the floor, dotted with white bindis all over and titled The Skin Speaks A Language Not Its Own, was one of the most talked-about works of art of this auction and is also the best-known installation by the 41-year-old artist. With dimensions of 142x456.2x195 cm, the work met the expectations of the auctioneers as it fell barely short of its highest pre-auction estimate of 1,000,000 Euro.
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