A lot has been written about the negative features of the art market, about fakes, jacked-up auction prices and monopolisation of art by dealers hoarding works, who create a false scarcity to get bigger profits. But there is a positive side to the picture as well.
This is the emergence of a new-found demand for contemporary art and the evolution of an independent thinking among crafts persons and people used to calendar art with its repetitive symbolism or the lifelessness of the decorative arts which may look pretty but lack depth. The aesthetic and thought provoking aspects of our contemporary art perspective are today influencing a far wider section of the people than ever before.
This was obvious in Mumbai at a big exhibition of contemporary art to mark 150 years of India?s freedom struggle. The exhibition featured works of not only leading artists like Akbar Padamsee, T Vaikuntham, Sunil Das, Paritosh Sen, but also young and upcoming artists like Neeraj Goswami, Shamshad Husain, Akhilesh, Harsha Vardhana, Anwar, Seema Ghurayya, Sheetal Gattani, Saba Hasan, Atul Sinha and Yati Jaiswal to name only a few.
This exhibition, entitled Celebrating India, which has been conceived by an organisation called Talent Resurgence And Youth (TRYO), was also showing a dozen or so works of prisoners and undertrials produced in workshops conducted by Mumbai-based organisation AVITOKO.
These works will be also exhibited in New Delhi from September 29 at Travancore Art Gallery, to be followed by similar exhibitions in all metros.
What was surprising was the enormous range of styles the prisoners had used to express themselves. There were portraits, landscapes and personal narratives. The works included colour-based abstracts, expressionist landscapes, and a very sensitive surrealist presentation of a prisoner?s condition. There were even works done in the style of the Worli artists. What was even more interesting was the theme of the exhibition. It was based on the games the prisoners play, like volleyball and cricket.
These are, of course, one-time results from workshops. But, clearly, there are artists in the making among them like Balram Sharma and Yasir Khan, Sachin, Ramesh and Zarina to name a few.
Such artists cannot be left to be trained by voluntary organisations or the prison authorities themselves, but we need galleries to be able to exhibit and sell their works on a regular basis. This would not only give us artists who are likely to be very different (like playwright Jean Genet who spent much of his time in prison), but also it would help to rehabilitate them when they leave jail after having served their sentences.
Of course there have been experiments on these lines by galleries like the Village Gallery in Delhi in collaboration with the prison authorities of Tihar Jail. But the point to be noted is how our growing art market has created favourable conditions for the emergence of contemporary artists from varied backgrounds as never before. This will doubtless serve to broaden the base of our art market to its advantage.