Yep! That’s right, you will be able to visit major museums around the world in your PJ’s. Just this month Google announced their newest project fittingly named, “Art Project”.  According to Google’s press release, they took “super high resolution images of famous artworks, as well as collating more than a thousand other images into one place. It also included building 360 degree tours of individual galleries.” It’s very similar to their street view on Google Maps, except you’re inside.

So far 17 museums (Altes Nationalgalerie, The Freer Gallery of Art Smithsonian, National Gallery (London), The Frick Collection, Gemäldegalerie, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, Museo Reina Sofia, Museo Thyseen – Bornemisza, Museum Kampa, Palace of Versailles, Rijksmuseum, The State Hermitage Museum, State Tretyakov Gallery, Tate, Uffizi and Van Gogh Museum) have collaborated with Google so that we can see paintings and other artwork from all angles, even zoomed in. It doesn’t include all of the museums collections but it’s quite extensive to say the least!
Viewers have the option to just view the artwork, or virtually walk around the museum. I opt for the walk-about! Click the photo for more info, or click here for a tour of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam! A place I’m sure a lot of us from the US have not been.

 

Artists FN Souza, SH Raza, MF Husain, KH Ara, SK Bakre and HA Gade, after a gap of six decades, are coming together under one roof. Get prepared to see some of the most exceptional and unseen works of these artists. Sixteen year old, Delhi Art Gallery after being closed for a year, is ready with its new show that every art lover would look forward to. Titled Continuum, the exhibition has 250 artworks.

As the gallery reopens with its new revamped look, we take you on a round. The new avatar has an elaborate space fitted with moveable lights and tracks, an art lounge with an upbeat and innovative seating area and an archival unit with some rare photographs of film-maker Satyajit Ray and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

As you enter the portico, your first rendezvous would be with a beautifully done up memorabilia shop with books, art collectives and souvenirs. The façade is done up with mix media artworks and gives an artistic feel to this shop. Next thing that would draw attention, is a spacious gallery with white space and moveable track light. This is followed by a sculptor court displaying the gallery’s permanent collection of sculptures. As soon you come out of the court you will find a “well-designed and conceptualised lounge area with bean bags and comfortable couches for art discussions, seminars, movie screening and everything that is related to art,” says Kishore Singh, head of the exhibitions at the gallery.

Take the stairs outside the lounge and you’ll reach the first floor of the gallery. It has a well-stocked library with over 1000 books, 6000 catalogues and a huge archival collection placed back to back in moveable racks. “We have tried to use the space to an optimum level, thus these moveable racks,” says Singh. Stop here to find some of the rarest books on the lives of artists like Raza and Souza. Another treasure hunt at this place, is a small room adjacent to the library that is maintaining an archival unit of photographs, letters and artworks on the lives of various artists.

And it does not end here, there is an admin block too, where a team of young people work on various aspects related to the launch of the gallery. Art storage and developing a module on art education is the priority on their list right now. “We are developing an art module where people can learn about art, art history, artists and artworks. There is a huge demand for a module like this right now,” says Singh.

With all these things in place, the Delhi Art Gallery wants to live the dream of a serious art space catering to everything related to art. The gallery will formally open on January 17.

After sports, it’s India Shining this year end, art-wise too! In an auction by online fine-art auction house Saffronart that will showcase the works of 43 modern and contemporary Indian artists at its annual winter auction, female artist — Arpita Singh’s work is estimated to fetch a staggering Rs 8-10 crore (US$ 1.9-2.3 million). It is the highest estimated work by an Indian woman artist to ever be offered in auction.

Titled Wish Dream, the 24 feet x 13 feet mural is said to arise out of the artist’s complex oeuvre spanning more than four decades. Elated over the news, Delhi-based Singh says, “The mural shows the wishes and dreams of a woman within our society and how it progresses and how it’s related to other women through ritual. The most important ritual is a wedding, so you’ll find a woman standing and from behind, two hands of a man holding her. I don’t like to keep space empty, so I fill it up with objects I see everyday. When I gather everything together, the whole pattern is meaningful. Individual forms are not very important to me.”

CEO and co-founder of the auction house, Dinesh Vazirani says, “It is the rarity of the work that determines its value. This is one of the most significant and largest works by any woman artist at any auction ever. It’s not a work that any artist will do again in their lifetime.”

Being India’s biggest collector doesn’t mean hoarding art selfishly. SAHAR ZAMAN gets a sneak peek of Kiran Nadar’s new museum IF YOU have followed the art auctions in the past five years, and wondered who went home with the show-stoppers on the cover of the auction catalogues, look no further than Noida. Here, in the Kiran Nadar Museum of Arts (KNMA), you can gently let your jaw descend at a Raja Ravi Varma from 1894, FN Souza’s Nude with Fruit (1958), MF Husain’s Ganga of the early 1970s, a Raqib Shaw, the first ever seen in India — The Absence of God (2008) — and Anish Kapoor’s untitled electric blue disc from 2009. And all this that is on display, forms only a fraction of Kiran Nadar’s personal collection of 300 works. Luckily, for the rest of us, Kiran likes to share.

A long-term art collector, Kiran plans to open up her collection to the public soon. Kiran is married to HCL founder Shiv Nadar and has dreamt of a museum since 2000. “It’s better to display art than to have it in storage or personal space,” she says. She launched it in January this year at an elegant but make-shift space at the HCL headquarters in Noida. The collection will be housed independently by 2012 in the vicinity. The Nadars have already set aside Rs 600 crore for the museum. It merely awaits an architect who shares Kiran’s vision for a highly contemporary museum. At our first meeting in 2007, during an Osian’s auction, 59- year-old Kiran Nadar was a striking contrast to most art collectors. Indian collectors are usually secretive, nervous as they are about the gentlemen from the Income-Tax department. But Kiran, in her bubbly, exuberant manner, confessed that she loves art and is addicted to buying it. Stepping into the KNMA three years later, it is easy to believe her. Kiran’s collection, with a net worth of Rs 250 crore, is fairly eclectic.

 She has a fantastic collection of Gaitondes and leans towards the moderns. But none of the contemporary art in her collection are minor notes: Subodh Gupta, Atul Dodiya, Jagannath Panda, GR Iranna, TV Santosh and of course, Raqib Shaw. Her final bid for SH Raza’s Saurashtra broke all previous records in the Indian art market — Rs 16.4 crore Kiran is a confident collector who trusts her instincts and likes to enjoy the process of buying art. If you know that she is a formidable bridge player who has played against Bill Gates and represented India at the World Bridge Championship, you will have a sense of the game face that she brings to art collection. At art auctions, she does not have people bid for her. She always bids herself. Take her latest acquisition — one that many column inches around the world were devoted to. In June, Kiran bought SH Raza’s Saurashtra at Christie’s, London. She had seen pictures of it and knew the significance of this seminal 1983 work — a painting from an important period when the Paris-based artist was returning to Indian aesthetics. When she finally saw this most ambitious of Raza’s works, Kiran says she was blown away. The day before, hers had been the runner-up bid for FN Souza’s Red Curse. Bidding for Saurashtra, she was tense, excited but aggressive.

Her final and successful bid broke all records in the Indian art market — $3.49 million (Rs 16.4 crore). Kiran’s vast energy is visible in everything she does. When she worked in advertising, she helped shape the formidable NIIT brand in computer education. An ardent sports-lover she travels 10 days in a month and has just returned from the football World Cup in South Africa. What is surprising, especially standing in her new bastion of high art, is Kiran’s frank enjoyment of pop culture. She is a die-hard fan of reality TV and gleefully says she would love to be the judge for a song and dance show. “I would like to be remembered as somebody who really did everything with commitment,” she says.

The Nadars are quite involved in philanthropic work within the traditional framework. One of their initiatives has been the Vidya Gyan School, a 20-acre campus that provides high-end education to underprivileged children from Uttar Pradesh. But Kiran’s personal crusade in the realm of art education — with little hopes of instant gratification — is one that wealthy Indians have so far been disinterested in. She outlines the dismal terrain clearly, saying, “We just have a handful of serious collectors in our country. Anupam Poddar (of Devi Art Foundation) is showing cutting edge contemporary art in his museum, Rajshri Pathy is planning an art college with a museum of her collection in Coimbatore, Rakhee Sarkar will soon have something in Kolkata, but what about the larger body of Indian corporates who make big profits? There were talks of major houses getting involved which hasn’t fructified. It would be great if more focussed private entrepreneurship came into the museum space.” Through her collection Kiran hopes to influence India’s museum policy for contemporary art. Currently, in India the duty on importing art is a steep 20 to 25 percent, making even ardent collectors pale.

So Saurashtra — the superstar among Kiran’s collection — is still waiting to arrive in India. Kiran says, “We are trying to get the government to give a tax exemption for museums. The tax structure for art is unrealistic in India. China has given a five-year tax holiday to art and the US has zero duty on art. So for a museum, to get this kind of work is important. Culture Secretary Jawahar Sarkar has been very supportive so far to consider a plea to the government that we get a tax exemption for Saurashtra.” Kiran is hopeful of the tax exemption but determined to bring Saurashtra home anyway. She says, “If we can’t get clearance, we will still get it in by paying duty. It’s not often that you get a Raza of this quality.” THE INDIAN art market is only 0.04 percent of the international market. Characteristically, Kiran doesn’t respond to this with platitudes about our steady growth. “A Picasso can go for more than $100 million so where are we at just $3.5 million for a Raza?” she asks. In a country without a museum culture, sustaining the 80,000 sq ft-planned KNMA is bound to be a challenge. But she remains pragmatic about the scene, saying, “Donations and funding for a museum come at a later stage. We are at an initial stage where we are doing it all on our own. You can’t expect people to come and fund you unless you are well-established.”

London, June 1: Indiansare now rich enough to buy back some of their artistic treasures, according toan expert at Christie’s, the London auction house which has placed a pricebetween £1.3 million and £1.8 million on a painting by Syed Hyder Raza.

If Saurashtra, the 200cmx200cm acrylic on canvas, achieves itstarget, it will exceed the previous record of £1,273,250 for La Terre, 1973,another of Raza’s works, set at a Christie’s auction in June 2008.

Well-heeled Indians are flooding London for two auctions onconsecutive days — the estate of Francis Newton Souza on June 9, followed by asale of works by, among others, Raza, M.F. Husain, Tyeb Mehta, Bhupen Khakhar,Subodh Gupta, Ganesh Pyne, and Jamini Roy on June 10.

The latter auction has three other works by Raza, valued at£5,000, £8,000 and £150,000 but is led by Saurashtra whose £1 million plusestimate has not been plucked out of the air.

This reassurance was given by Yamini Mehta, a Mumbai girl whogrew up in America but moved over after seven years with Christie’s New York toChristie’s London to be its senior specialist and director of the contemporaryIndian art department.

“Raza himself considers Saurashtra to be one of the 10 mostimportant works he has done in his life,” she told The Telegraph.

Raza, who is 88, has been invited to attend the auction.

“The artist, though living in France for more thanhalf-a-century, is a revered master in India and the painting is one of hismost ambitious works he has ever created as homage to his homeland,” Mehtasaid.

“Its size, scale, and expressive brushstrokes radiate thebrilliant colours of India and has a deeply spiritual subtext. In this onework, the artist has worked through all of the themes of his long and variedcareer and serves as the shining example of one of the best works in this fieldto come to auction.”

The value depended on “the size of the painting, the palate,where it fits into the artist’s oeuvre”, Mehta explained.

She also described Jamini Roy’s depiction of sunset over theHooghly, valued at £5,000 to £7,000, as “a very nice work, very charming. Itwas bought by an Italian diplomat who met (Roberto) Rosselini, when he wasfilming in India (and did a bunk with a Bengali housewife, Sonali Das Gupta).So there are stories attached to these paintings”.

Raza’s Saurashtra, painted in 1983, comes from a Frenchcollector who acquired it directly from the artist.

Whenever Raza is asked about what inspires him, he comes outwith the same answer: “I have never left India. I love my country and I amproud of it.”

On who is likely to spend over a million pounds on acquiring theRaza masterpiece or indeed any of the other works in the auctions, Mehtaspeculated: “It’s so iconic it could go just about anywhere. We have sent 3,500catalogues all over the world. It could go to an NRI or someone in India. Thepurchasing power of Indians has gone up a lot, we have noticed.”

In London, revealed Mehta, “we have Lakshmi Mittal’s wife (Usha)who is on the board of Christie’s holding private events.”

The Hindu newspaper reports that art collector and co-sponsor of the India Art Summit, Rajshree Pathy is to open an art institute and museum of contemporary art in Coimbatore India by 2011. She has named the entire venture Contemplate. She says: The art institute will have post-graduate, under-graduate and short certificate courses. We will have a world-class faculty, including those from abroad, and will focus on all kinds of media separately – visual art, video, audio, digital, new media, et al.” The museum will display works of contemporary artists. To begin with, it will have works mounted from her own collection, from Raza to Rameshwar Broota and Souza to Chintan Upadhyay. Rajshree Pathy, art collector and co-sponsor India Art Summit Rajshree Pathy, art collector and co-sponsor India Art Summit Big plans, big stakes and a big venue says The Hindu but points out that Coimbatore is a city that has had little exposure to art. Rajshree replies rather contemplatively, “Coimbatore is a university area with over 100,000 students. It is peaceful – a must to think and produce art.” Moreover, the course fees, she promises, will be “very affordable”. “My intention is to spread awareness of art to the masses. Today, our students don’t even know who Raja Ravi Varma is, forget contemporary artists. On the other hand, abroad, even small children are aware of Picasso. This is because art teaching has not been taken seriously at the primary level. We have IT, engineering and medical colleges, but how many art institutes do we have? There is nothing called art journalism in India. Courses on art as a business, how to curate art shows, art appreciation and its aesthetics; there is so much to explore for an art student.” Discussions on affiliation with foreign faculties are on, and Contemplate is likely to be “fully operational” by 2011. “With a residential programme as an added feature, we also plan to expand to other cities,” says a smiling Rajshree. Source: The Hindu

CEO of on-line Indian auction house Saffronart explains that the collector base for Indian art is changing Dinesh Vazirani is the CEO and Co-Founder of Saffronart, the world’s largest online auction house for fine art and jewelry. In the Podcast interview with ArtTactic, he reviewed the performance of the Indian art market in 2009. He also shared his observations on the changes in the Indian art market in the recent year. Moreover, he shared part of his formula of success in running an online auction platform of such scale. How was the performance of the Indian Art Market in 2009? To what extent has the Indian Art Market recovered from the financial crisis in 2009? A lot of changes happened in the post financial crisis period. The initial six months was a difficult time for the art market. The base of the investors and collectors changed quite dramatically. Investors and speculators that are active in the post financial crisis disappeared from the market. There are real collectors looking for good value and premium quality. In the later part of the year with the Indian economy getting better, confidence and perception changed. We saw some of the collector base come by and want to buy the best of the best. In the early part of the year, prices of modern art retreated by around 30-50% and contemporary art by 50-80%. Modern art prices recovered by 15-30% later in the year and contemporary art came back by 10-15%. In 2009, the Indian market underwent a transitional change. The players changed. Some galleries and auction houses shut down and some opened. How is the heavy presence of speculators a threat to the sustainability of the Indian Art Market? Speculators come into the market and drive up the prices. In 2005 to 2008, prices rose dramatically which brought in a whole slew of speculators, investors, private dealers, collectors and funds. In 2009, after the financial crisis, these players disappeared but they will come back if the value is right. However, it is not expected that they would be jumping into the market as fast as in 2005. This downturn in Indian Art is the first ever downturn in the history of Indian art. Most people have not gone through a downturn to understand the implications of it. What pattern has been developed in the collector base? The previous collectors of Indian Art are large corporate houses and business houses in the India subcontinent. However, in the last five years, the collector based has moved from a business house concentrated end towards a broader collector base, which constitutes a lot of professionals, younger collectors from the finance field and young business people. Interestingly, some are from outside of India. In 2006, more non-Indians collected Indian contemporary art and wanted it as a cultural bridge. What is your outlook for the Indian art market in 2010? Players will be coming back to purchase work and a new base of buyers are expected too. There were people wanting to come in to buy during 2005 to 2008, but the price rose too sharply then, so they want to come in now and see if they can get premium values. 2010 will be dependent on two things. One is the perception and confidence of the Indian base customers and the other is the participation of non-Indian buyers in the post finance crisis period in the art market. Why has Saffronart been so successful as an online auction house when no auction houses have found equal success in this format? For the past 10 years, we have been building up the collector base, giving them the confidence and transparency and improving the technological platform. On the other side, we have been doing physical exhibitions and previews all around the world, including San Francisco, L.A., Mumbai, New Dehli, Hong Kong and London. To make people confident, we added the brick and mortar side. It is the “the click and the brick” that has made Saffronart so successful. Nearly every business is heading to the direction of going online. Is the art market fundamentally changing because of the web? Over time, there will be a strong shift towards online transactions. People will transact more online or even leaning more to mobile bidding platforms. These mobile bidding platforms have been enormously successful.

How do you go about choosing just one artist in 2009 who continued doing what an artist does best: painting with consistency, experimenting, picking up commissions of a certain scale, and commanding top-of-the-bracket prices in that genre? And who would most likely take this forward in 2010 as the face of Indian art and as, probably, its safest blue-chip investment? Trends across 2009 were mostly erratic. Even top artists took a sabbatical, gallery movement before the India Art Summit was almost comatose, plummeting prices meant that most contemporary artists went out of circulation, and investor confidence in art was so low it impacted artists’ morale. It is indicative of contemporary art continuing to remain off-stage in 2010: these artists will show more than they sell, they will experiment more, and some like Jitish Kallat will have a huge impact as ambassadors as they present the intellectual face of Indian art internationally. But no contemporary Indian artist can singly take on the onus of being the face of 2010 — they are showing less, prices still have to rise, and what many of us are getting to see at shows in India or abroad are old works. Others have still to achieve a record of consistency — something that had been ignored in the euphoria that was largely responsible for the crash in prices — and which is why the likes of Sunil Gawde or N S Harsha will have to wait for their spot in the sun. Among the old guard, gallerists I spoke with put forward interesting suggestions ranging all the way from A Ramachandran to Krishen Khanna, whose works I admire but who have not had any path-breaking shows or created an especial stir to qualify for the role, to Satish Gujral, who it was pointed out has perhaps been India’s most consistent artist and one whose prices have not been impacted by the market. While that may be true, his largely “decorative” features and tag as a “society” artist continue to trip him up. Another friend’s suggestion that Paresh Maity be considered for his ability to re-invent himself held some merit, but Maity too has to fight off the “romantic” tag and travel some more distance to move from “investment-worthy” to “collector-worthy”. It was surprising that almost no one I spoke to took cognizance of S H Raza’s great influence on the market — there is a frenzy around collecting him, his prices have remained high, there is a buzz around him every time he returns to India (even if the reason is the artist being invited to inaugurate a show of fakes of his own works!), and at auctions or in galleries, he continues to sell well. But the artist is slowing down because of health-related issues, likely to shift to India, and may take some time settling down before he resumes painting again. That hardly qualifies him as the face of 2010, though his success through the year is at least assured. But by a huge margin, and quite clearly the face of 2009 that will remain the face of 2010, is M F Husain. There was a brief time a few years ago when Husain’s genius was eclipsed, when younger artists were being feted, when some of his peers commanded higher returns at auctions, when he was even dismissed as being too gimmicky or too market-driven. All those nay-sayers can now eat crow. Not only does he make news all the time, and despite staying away from India because of threats to his life (largely exaggerated, I believe, but adding to his aura as an artist-in-exile), Husain continues to thrive. Recent auctions have confirmed his price hierarchy among Indian artists (Tyeb Mehta, who died this year, has not been included in this survey of only living artists), and the scale of his commissions on the Arab civilisation will leave him richer by millions of dollars. Love him or not, you cannot ignore Husain, and if he remained in the news in 2009, he will continue to make headlines in 2010. While many in this informal survey voted for Husain, Saffronart’s Dinesh Vazirani summed it up beautifully: “[Husain] has been working consistently throughout the year, mounting some very large exhibitions internationally. The beginning of the year saw his work in the Serpentine show, followed by a large commission from the Sheikha of Qatar. Even with no exhibitions in India, he is still present in the minds of the art world. He travels the world as an ambassador of Indian art bringing in new collectors at every stage. In spite of the slow year for Indian art, his prices in auctions have been good. He has taken his exile from India in the best possible spirit and continues to work with the same passion that he has had over the last 50 years.” Nothing more need be said.

I hope that the locked doors of Bodhi Art Gallery serve as a warning to the Indian artists that big talk and grand gestures are best believed only when sustained. The clink of empty cocktail glasses make a hollow sound and show up their chips and cracks without the camouflage of our own desperation. It's high time to roll up the imaginary red carpet that you think is beneath your feet, and with it roll up your sleeves instead. There is no substitute for good old fashioned humility and hard work, and let's raise a toast to that!

After the grotesque drama of the past few years, there's more talk of art (as opposed to prices) these days

Over the past couple of years, the volatility of prices of contemporary Indian art made even the most exotic commodities look tame. I realised this when I saw that a 2006 Subodh Gupta painting, part of his Untitled series of paintings of kitchen utensils, sold on Saffron Art last week for $209,000; significantly, there were only two bidders for the work, suggesting also that may not have been a market clearing price. What is amazing is that a similar work — from the same 2006 series, almost identical content, identical in size — had sold for over $1.4 million at Saffron’s June 2008 auction. Its price has fallen by more than 85 per cent from just over a year ago!

For comparison, the Dow fell by 46 per cent from June 2008, and, incidentally, has already recovered more than half of its decline; the BSE fell by 53 per cent, and has recovered all and more of its losses.

Granted that paintings are not commodities or stocks, although the art “market” certainly resembled a financial market over the last few years. But it is clear — and widely acknowledged — that the prices of Subodh’s work (and of several others) had, by 2008, been pumped up by spectacular speculation, lubricated by the lugubrious prose (sorry, couldn’t resist that) of a handful of “critics”, who, like the credit rating agencies in the financial crisis, were the handmaidens, politely speaking, of the small group of players — art dealers, businessmen, traders and even some art galleries — that burst on the scene about five or six years ago and drove the bubble to such grotesque heights.

Long before the madness — say, around 1999-2000 — contemporary Indian art had come into its own and was evolving a unique balance where even mid-range artists could make a good living selling their work at prices that were affordable to a growing band of middle-income buyers. There were, maybe, a few thousand people involved — artists, gallery owners, a sprinkling of academics, old-time collectors and new buyers.

However, by around 2003, the steadily rising prices — 15 to 30 per cent a year — began to attract hordes of cash-rich culture-poor people, many of them recently enriched by the globalisation of our economy, and, particularly, our financial markets. By 2005, things had gotten crazy. There were artists and art dealers and art buyers under every rock. Nobody talked about art any more — the only thing that mattered was price.

To be fair, the parties did get a lot better, but it was increasingly unreal and you could feel the end coming. Prices accelerated further and by the time the music stopped — thank you, Chuck Prince — there must have been a couple of hundred thousand people involved in the contemporary Indian art market.

Most of these are gone. Probably half were just there for the money. They didn’t know (or even care) about the artist or the work. Tell me what will go up fastest. Shockingly, I got a mail yesterday from someone still asking that question.

Another 25 or 30 per cent were probably attracted by the hype — the parties, the tamasha, and the coolness of buying art. Most of these are also gone, although some were hooked and remain.

Which means that at the end of the day — or, better yet, the start of the new day — the art community is probably a bit more than twice as large as it was ten years ago. About the size it would have been without the hoopla, and without the terrible consequences for many artists, art dealers, and, perhaps worst of all, art students, who bought the hype and lost their souls.

Of course, there are dozens — hundreds — of artists who continue to produce work for themselves, rather than for the market. Some of them participated in and enjoyed the tamasha; some were more circumspect socially. But their art continues to mature and the prices of their work, too, remain on the steady 15-30 per cent a year growth path, which had prevailed before the insanity.

To be sure, many of the market darlings have also evolved — Subodh certainly has — and appear to have ridden the grotesque drama of the past few years to good effect. All drama takes us to a better place, provided we don’t take ourselves too seriously.

The drama isn’t fully over — I’m sure there are a few more shoes to drop. But the good news is that there’s more talk of art (as opposed to prices) these days, and the parties are starting up again.