"Tomorrow's Blue-Chip" art exhibition, curated by Sharan Appa Rao of the Appa Rao Galleries, will be held at The Park Hotel, Chennai, in collaboration with ABN AMRO on December 20.
The title leaves little doubt in one's mind about aesthetic production becoming integrated into commodity production. The demand for newness and freshness places a premium on the types and varieties of art products, conditioning the function and position of aesthetics, innovation and experimentation. And these economic and aesthetic structures are validated by institutional support available for newer art forms from grants and museums to art galleries, corporate houses, art journals and astute dealers.
Says Sharon, commenting on the growth of art market since post-independence, "In the early 1960s and the 1970s, art collecting was limited to foreigners, ICS officers, diplomats and academicians. Husain, Gaitonde, Krishen Khanna, Tyeb Mehta, Souza and Hebbar sold their works for a few hundred rupees. Today, their works are considered blue-chip and worth lakhs of rupees. The trading creates the upward movement of prices."
Within the art market, the shared terminology with other economic forces provide centrality and individual space for art to trade as a commodity.
The vital question is which category of audience trades in art works?
An important part of sociological understanding of art and culture is an analysis of the audience — the cultural consumer. The reader, viewer or audience is actively involved in the construction of the work of art, and without the act of reception/consumption, the cultural product is incomplete. In other words, it complements and completes it.
And towards this ownership of culture, the audience is largely limited to the educated upper class and those of the social class, who largely form the weightiest determinant to one's culture.
Today's contemporary scene encircles a cross-section of the audience and professionals in diverse arenas, besides art lovers who look towards the art market as a haven for investment. The entry of international art auctioneers in the late 1980s into the Indian arena has resulted in the art market changing for artists, boosting their prices and increasing their visibility internationally. Consequently, these agencies are the main players within the artistic circuit appreciating the value of modern Indian art works. A case in point is Tyeb Mehta's painting that recently fetched a record Rs.1.6 crores. The present show leans heavily towards these concepts, marking important changes in curatorial ventures as well as innovative methods to project young artists and their works for "consumption". Since change in art is permanent, it vindicates the curator's perception that "today, art has little to do with beauty and the story. The centre of the art is the concepts, communication, visual pleasure, ideology and the vocabulary the artist builds in his own sphere".
In the present exhibition the seven participating artists are young and on the threshold of their careers hoping to make works that in time would translate into blue-chip art.
The seven are A. Balasubramaniam, Chandra Bhattacharjee, Manish Nai, Sajid bin Amar, Sandip Paradkar, Smriti Dixit and Srinivasachari. Their works are as diverse and varied as the regions of the country they come from. Their techniques are experimental and traditional. For these young Turks, it is the stimulation from life, experiences and intuition that has enabled the precipitation of their concepts as visual statements. Abstract language is the dominant artists choice of "representation" meticulously working through their ideologies as the basis of their creations. Balasubramaniam, Manish, Smriti, Sandip and Sajid have worked towards this idiom. Srinivasachari and Chandra have their notions conveyed through human form.
Balasubramaniam, the young inter-diaspora artist (from Chennai to Bangalore), is a familiar name on home turf. His versatility ranges from printmaking to painting to installations, and undoubtedly has prolific and productive years ahead of him.
Manish's idiomatic concerns (from the Raheja School of Painting, Bombay) are directly related to his medium and material. The numerous space and controlled organisations of poetic colours lend subtlety to his part collage-part paintings.
Sajid bin Amar, a student of Laxma Goud, who fundamentally influenced his imagery, is on his artistic sojourn after shifting styles and repertoire. Linear simplicity, naive spontaneity, subtlety of tones and interesting techniques mark his abstracts.
Smriti, a resident of Bhopal, moved to Bombay to give her art greater visibility. Her compositions with insertions of marks and traces, are residues of her acute perceptions of various ritualistic signs and symbols.
The philosophical tilt in Sandip's cerebration allows concern for space as well as the varied materials (dry seed, leaves, flowers, barks, cotton wool, etc.) that he artistically engages with. His relationship based concepts employ materials as metaphors. The space, which is his obsession, concerns "in between" realities, that is, life between death and living, the space between layers of cotton, of pain and pleasure.
Srinivasachari and Chandra have communicated their urban related sensitivity through human forms. Since a large mass of humanity is what they encounter in their daily transactions, inevitably, it leads to their acute psychological observations of relationships. Their works are largely social commentaries which Srinivaschari makes on the institution of marriage and Chandra on the "realities" that subsume the human within this aura of urban space.
For all these artists' powerful visual language join forces with their equally verbal articulations. These twin dimensions in today's art practice have leverage, enhancing the prospects of marketing their "cultural goods". The lucidity and/or complexities or profundities of ideas have to be impressed upon the discerning art dealer, who intuitively, with his/her awareness of contemporary scene, precipitates the sale of artwork. Largely, the creativity of the artist also gets conditioned and dictated by the dealer-client nexus.