Avant garde art exudes contemporary hues

Avant garde art, known to set aesthetic trends touch away from the commercial realm, is looking to reinvent itself as cutting edge contemporary art with a slight tilt towards market forces in the spectrum of post-globalized India. A recent report by the news agency (IANS) underlines this fact. Here are the key points that it makes in underlining how Indian avant garde art is getting a subtle market tilt:

• The history of avant garde in post-modern Indian art dates back to the 1970s with Vivan Sundaram who created his own language away from the mainstream by using a combined artscape of performance, art, design, European avant garde and Indian socio-cultural references, allowing viewers to participate in his art.
  
  
• Art expert Daniel Kunitz recently stated: "It’s cutting edge art which is going on in the world today. We have been playing safe far too long...The attitude is how do we think conceptually beyond this? If artists are not concerned about saleability and were interested in pushing through the conceptual boundary, it would have been avant garde art."
  
  
• The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art ormer director, David Ross has been quoted as saying, "Why art no longer qualifies as avant garde is because of the consuming power of the growing collectors' class. It has made it possible for artists to sell everything to the mass market.
  
  
• America is a melting pot of several cultures. All these cultural references came together to make a distinct mix that bent set rules to create something new. In India, when the symbols and values of the great traditional arts heritage collide with the different constructs of neo art, it forms cutting edge avant garde expressions," Ross elaborated.
  
  
• Artist Arpana Caur concludes by stating: "Every day, when I paint, I think it is avant garde because it is new. I sometimes have blood in my work - and by sticking to my blood, I think it's avant garde. "