5 min readNew DelhiFeb 5, 2025 11:30 AM IST
First published on: Jan 30, 2025 at 01:16 PM IST
After five decades of struggle serving creative and cultural industries, I find that the best patrons for the arts in the subcontinent are the artists themselves. Patronage requires becoming one with a creative spirit. Culture can’t be owned. Museums are hot houses collecting trophies. Corporates celebrating heritage create branded properties – not people or communities. The commerce of art mostly needs the artist as a part of its sales talk. The government subsidises culture to exercise control without ensuring quality. Very few appreciate that the art survives as long as the artist does. Otherwise, artworks are simply commodities and the rarer they become – the better for those who treat them like high-priced merchandise — much in demand, less in supply.
That is why living craft traditions that are prolific have a more difficult future. Survival means more than financial exigency. If handicraft production becomes easily replicable and skills are conserved for mere nostalgia, new-age machines will soon replace all that the hands can make. To remain authentic, each brush stroke, each chisel, each stitch, each pattern, each form has to reflect that fine moment when the “eye-hand” and spirit conjoin to celebrate variation.
Economic indices may position India as poor, but it’s very rich in its heritage of legacy enterprises represented by the informal sector. Our education remains indifferent to skills that have made India famous but have left its protagonists very poor. Few applaud traditional knowledge systems in this age of hyper-AI. Yet, skills manifested by our fine artists cannot be the only future of work. India art fairs now include designs and crafts to make art more sexy. But a seamless celebration of transdisciplinary interface is the key to India’s new creative edge.
India must also recognise its pivotal position concerning peace in the beleaguered neighbourhood of South Asia. How about a South Asian art fair? What art can do, politics can’t. Bade Ghulam Ali Khan often used to say that one musician in each family would be the end of war and violence. Likewise, the meditative quality of hand-spinning remains more critical than Khadi’s commercial logistics. Our tragedy is that in the name of modernity and economic viability, we have chosen to marginalise the indigenous and belittle the tenacity of the self-organised as unorganised. As “homemade” becomes more impractical and “handmade” more expensive, they cannot become a panacea for unemployment.
Instead, for slow growth to nurture more livelihoods, we would need a huge investment in fostering a learning environment. Art education is a big growing business – like healing arts – that requires a complete commitment to becoming self-sustaining and answerable to some standards. Recognition of artistic heirlooms, separating them from the industry of “fakes”, will also require rigorous and inclusive schooling at all levels of pedagogy. Art fairs may offer only a glamourous tip of what is visible but can go a long way to break a jaded perception of what is unique to South Asia. The business of art requires its own evolving ecosystem – but not everything in it leaves me comfortable right now.
Art galleries are essential mediators and must empower themselves to carve a niche. They will jostle style and taste to dictate the needs of an emerging market. However, their primary task is to find and support the creative urge of unknown artists amplifying our creative vocabularies. As important stakeholders, they must reposition artworks that will lead to sensitising the young new patrons. Extra care must be taken not to sideline empowering the protagonist. While the top doesn’t erode easily, it’s the base of the pyramid that requires rigorous enhancement. This means taking art out of strong rooms and repositioning and commissioning them for the public domain.
Content must not be compromised with what sells to match rich interiors. One goes to the art fair to see how artists and their galleries have catalysed new issues, skills, and materials with dynamic scenography, redefining public engagement. Social media dominates the experience of Rasa. Culture today is consumed — no doubt collectively — but through a palm device. What is made palatable becomes the trend, and the biggest truth can become the biggest lie. An art fair does not measure either the width or depth of the talent struggling to be noticed.
Despite the algorithms of reels and their autonomous unbridled innovation, the grassroots with a phone in hand is thirstier and potently more powerful than the thousands that throng a few hangers with hundred booths inside and state-of-the-art Audi’s parked outside. The Art Biennale of the world is also famous for the tangible they leave behind once the manifestation is over. Be it urban renewal, revival of languishing assets, or conservation of derelict neighbourhoods and monuments, the publicity and goodwill art fairs carry can also end up being more than just putting up a bazaar of the few, by the fewer and for the fewest.
The writer is the founder-trustee and chairman of Asian Heritage Foundation
Art galleries are essential mediators and must empower themselves to carve a niche. They will jostle style and taste to dictate the needs of an emerging market (Representational image/ Express Photo) 
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