‘Are today's artists more driven by the market than innovation?

‘Can you recall a single innovative show during the year? Anything that broke the mold, invited fresh thinking, enchanted art-lovers and showed the world that India counts for something in the global firmament of art?”

Columnist Kishore Singh of The Busines Standard asks in his essay, titled ‘A lacklustre year’. He notes: “Sure, there were some interesting retrospectives, we got to see Gulammohammad Sheikh’s work after some length of time, Anish Kapoor’s homecoming exhibitions in New Delhi and Mumbai were welcome (and made him an instant icon), Pundole’s joined the list of auction houses in India, but was there anything that was unexpected, surprising, that bowled you over?

Not that the promoters were able to supply us with works to make us sigh and say, ‘that’s genius,’ either. But if the masters had abdicated in favour of second and third generation followers, it was a poor bargain. In a year when India’s presence internationally was dismal (despite a pavilion at Basel), where was the cutting-edge art, the boldness, the ideas?

Market sentiments might have contributed to making promoters risk-averse, but what of the artists themselves? No one artist came out to protest that galleries were unwilling to support their experimentation. The pity is that the new generation, hanging on to the tails of the old, has taken to falling back on clichés in the guise of high art.

It’s a betrayal made all the more acute because it has sought the safety of the bazaar which, in recent years, has provided it with creature comforts beyond the imagination of most senior artists - well-deserved, surely, but earned on the laurels of that past generation.

The new age artist is in danger - hardly of extinction but, alas, of morphing into a drawing room clone driven by the market - providing once again a setback to art at the cost of questionable, even immoral, aesthetics. As 2012 nears, it’s time to ask whether the culpability now lies with collectors, promoters or, more unfortunately, the artists themselves?' the columnist concludes.