Boom and the bust - Indian art has seen it all...

So what are the other prominent developments in the domain of Indian art as far as the decade just gone by is concerned? Anindita Ghose of The Mint has compiled a few in an in-depth column. We list some of them below:

• Mumbai based Gallery Chemould, one of India’s oldest and the most recognized venues for contemporary art, moved to a bigger space in 2007. Meanwhile, a host of new galleries such as Galleryske in Bangalore, Chatterjee and Lal and Project 88in Mumbai - were founded.
  
  
• New publications of art news and serious criticism such as Art & Deal and Art India flourished. New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University decided to institute graduate courses in art history, which are producing a new generation of aware art critics and museologists. In 2008, India got its first real international scale fair, namely the India Art Summit.
  
  
• There was another significant factor, which orchestrated the upswing. This wasn’t an auction house or even an artist. It was a gallery. Bodhi clearly changed the rules of the game. It was founded by Amit Judge in 2006 in Mumbai. Known to be a dynamic entrepreneur, he set up popular coffee chain Barista, among other businesses.
  
  
• Bodhi, at its peak, had branches in Singapore, New York, Berlin and New Delhi. The artists it represented with panache and style across the globe, simply loved it. If it was among the most prominent emblems of the Indian art market’s dizzying rise at one point, it also epitomized the market’s free fall. When the recession hit the art market in India in 2009, all of its international outfits were shut. And prices of some of its coveted artists fell by an astonishing 50-70%.
  
  
• The total sales of the three major auction houses for Indian art (namely Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Saffronart) was just under $5 million at the peak of the meltdown in early 2009. In comparison, the sales figure had crossed the $ 21 million mark in the summer of 2008.
  
  
• However, experts saw more virtue than vice in this free fall. When the bubble finally burst, it inadvertently sifted the genuine collectors from the sheer speculators. The art world reestablished that much needed crucial connect between pure artistic achievements and reasonable prices something that had gone completely haywire during the market boom...But then boom was again round the corner!