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Art and heart are for saleThe brainy one who invented the fax machine could never have imagined that one day his machine would serve not o...

Art and heart are for sale
The brainy one who invented the fax machine could never have imagined that one day his machine would serve not only the brain but also the heart if art comes from the heart. The fax machine is meant for sending a document instantaneously to its destination. But the other day it proved that it could also wrap the world, artistically and to the delight of art literates. Yes, the happening was called 8220;wrap the world8221;. The media reported it abundantly, with pictures of the fax machine and artists. Nothing surprising about it. You cannot wrap the world without the media coming to your help.

In the days of yore, art came into being spontaneously, it existed in the intimacy of the gaze of art lovers. You accessed the soul of a work of art with your heart or on the wings of your dreams. Now you don8217;t need either. Whether you like it or not, art forces its way to you. In our days, art is a 8220;happening.8221;

The latest happening innovatively curated by Neil Butler, was an artwork on 100 ft of paper fed into a fax machine, which ran through six cities in the world as far flung as New York, Johannesburg, Sydney and our own Delhi. In each of these cities the 100-ft paper was retrieved by artists on their fax machines, they painted on it, fed it into their machines and saw it on to its next destination. The end product is a work of art carrying memories of five continents. It is a technological feat to mark the new millennium.

Photocopies of the artwork will be auctioned and funds raised in India will go to Orissa cyclone victims while in other countries the money raised will be used for AIDS victims. Obviously, a come-hither idea for a noble cause.The theme of this innovative exercise was 8220;connectivity8221; 8211; to connect peoples of disparate and disjoined continents across the fractured world, who have been lately showing a disquieting penchant to disconnect.

In parallel, there is another artwork for promotion of connectivity which beckons us from the TV set in our drawing room. A large layer of coloured cloth, akin to the flag of an undeclared dream Republic, that hovers caught in the breeze over villages and little towns of our country, connecting them. It is no self-advertised artwork put together by artists of repute, but in itself an advertisement for a well-known mobile phone. The lyrical ad is the product of subtle imagination.

Each time I look at the ad, I have the impression that now ad firms are producing better artworks than some of our well-known artists.

But that is not the point I want to drive home here. What is striking is the fact that both these works of imagination want to sell and make money, their proclaimed intention to connect notwithstanding. It hardly matters whether it is the art generated by a fax machine or inspired by a mobile phone, whether it connects or disconnects, what matters is it should sell. In the process, artists turn corporate managers and art gets externalised.

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Indeed, gone are the days when artists were oversensitive recluse and their works of art were a shared invitation to trudge along the antipodes of human existence.