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UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Art patron as 'taste scapegoat'? Complicity and disavowal in Mumbai's contemporary art world Sooudi, O.K. Publication date 2012 Document Version Final published version Published in Etnofoor Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Sooudi, O. K. (2012). Art patron as 'taste scapegoat'? Complicity and disavowal in Mumbai's contemporary art world. Etnofoor, 24(2), 123-143. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:30 Sep 2021 Art Patron as ‘Taste Scapegoat’? Complicity and Disavowal in Mumbai’s Contemporary Art World Olga Kanzaki Sooudi University of Amsterdam I am not bothered about the flight of buyers; restaurant. The gallery itself is tucked a few floors the serious collectors will stay and fly-by-night above the street; no large signs indicate it. speculators will leave. It is dark inside, with only a few lights lit from the (Neville Tuli, of Osian’s Auction House, ceiling. There is a repeating sound-cycle of soft shirrs quoted in India Today, 14 May 2007) and booms coming from the new media installations. The gallery opens up to a three-artist exhibition on its On a January evening, an art gallery opening is walls. About 15 people are there, talking in small happening in Mumbai. The private gallery, a block clumps, short-stemmed wine glasses in hand. Most of away from the Arabian Sea, is in Colaba, a newly them have seen each other before – fellow artists, art populated area. Kala Ghoda, a few minutes away by aficionados, art writers and critics, and gallery owners. taxi, with its sprawling colonial buildings, is the city’s This gallery opening, one of many during Mumbai’s established art district. But lower rents have brought fall and winter cultural season, serves a critical function: galleries to the so-called Arab Quarter. Along the noisy it allows art industry insiders to maintain their street, cluttered with Muslim vendors selling perfumes relationships. Indeed, though such openings are osten- and shawls, are marked signs of gentrification – a sibly vehicles for promoting art, they primarily serve Barista coffee shop sits across from a high-end Italian to consolidate the art community (Cohen 1985). Etnofoor, Taste, volume 24, issue 2, 2012, pp. 123-143 I attended such events for an ongoing research project, For such insiders, artistic creation is usually upheld begun in December 2011, on Mumbai’s contemporary as a sublime pursuit. Artworks cannot be simply art scene. reduced to monetary sums, or exchanged like other, Many told me – only half-jokingly – that they saw mundane commodities (Bourdieu 1984, 1993). This the same people nightly at such events. This circuit doxa is enacted through the collective activity and allowed for ongoing, overlapping conversations. It also complex networks of artists, dealers, galleries and underlined this world’s limited contours: a number of consumers (Becker 1982). As guardians of high culture, people meeting repeatedly in galleries, parties, and art taste is a primary idiom through which identities and fairs overseen by private security and accessed with social hierarchies are expressed (Bourdieu 1984; Gans invitations. This gallery opening was where Mumbai’s 1999; Lamont 1992). Good taste in art legitimates, in a art players enacted their public personae. It was a twofold manner: gallerists, dealers, critics and artists performance space for displaying one’s pedigree, must first legitimate the artworks, and second, continu- patronage, accent, dress and comportment. Such fine ally rationalize their authority as rightful tastemakers distinctions regarding membership, codes of behavior (Baumann 2007). and trends constitute ‘status-defining institutions’ like But good taste, whether as ‘refined’ behavior or a art worlds (DiMaggio and Useem 1978: 153). These finely-tuned aesthetic eye, is, as many sociologists have gatherings, as ritualized activities, reproduce a class of pointed out, something hard to come by. Good taste is elite tastemakers and foster social and ideological attached to high levels of cultural capital, forms of cohesion. Just as insiders’ distinction and cultivation are skills, knowledge and codes of behavior that take time, validated, non-members are distanced. Those who fail usually in the form of extended higher humanistic to articulate the proper tastes, fashions and knowledge education, to attain. Moreover, it is not, nor is it meant within the art world thus become peripheral (ibid.). to be, democratically shared. Cultural capital, for It was therefore unsurprising that on this January example, unfolds over the long-term, through inter- evening, most attendees knew each other, or at least generational transmission (Bourdieu 1984, 1993; had heard of one another. These insiders often lived in DiMaggio 1987; Halle 1992). the same Mumbai neighborhoods, had attended the At the Colaba gallery, and in my other conversa- same schools and colleges, and spoke with practiced tions with art world insiders, people kept talking about ease of canons such as the Bombay Progressive Artists’ someone who, in their minds, had no taste. This was Group. Another critical element bound this commu- the Indian businessman: while physically absent, he nity: a deeply felt and oft-professed love of art. At first, was, discursively, ever-present. Among Mumbai art this may seem obvious; yet in the context of recent insiders I met, the businessman was the key player convulsions in Mumbai’s art world, such love might be during the Indian ‘art boom’ of recent years. ‘Boom’ was considered less an individual feeling than a sign of an emic term, for what insiders perceived to be a liminal belonging. interval. They did not mean it as a description of 124 cyclical economic movement, but as a disruption of portrayals allow artists, dealers and gallerists to become what they saw as normal conditions between 2005 and legitimate arbiters of artistic production. In both his 2008 (Turner 1987).1 During this time, Indian art obvious attempt to acquire social prestige by collecting prices rose, and Indian artwork garnered newfound art, and his insatiable desire to turn a quick profit attention. Private art galleries, centered mainly in Delhi through art investments, the businessman engaged and Mumbai, multiplied. The domestic press kept a with art in the wrong way. In this narrative, the busi- tally on the record highs Indian art commanded at nessman, after a period of uncertainty and disappoint- international auctions. ment, was blamed for hastening the end of an oppor- Yet the boom was spoken about with great ambiva- tunistic frenzy that he actually helped to create. lence. On the one hand, it was ‘the good times’, in the How do we explain the businessman’s spectral words of one artist, when opportunities for selling and presence in the context of the Mumbai art world’s self-promotion mushroomed for artists and dealers. attempt to reestablish normative boundaries and codes? On the other, the market highs did not last, crashing in In this paper, I draw on ethnographic research in late 2008, in lockstep with the global recession.2 Over- Mumbai’s art community, scholarly literature on artistic extended, new galleries closed, auctions dwindled, and taste and the anthropological notion of the scapegoat. Indian art prices fell. Years later, art world insiders were Firstly, I argue that community members perceived their reflective about this recent, liminal period. For many ‘boom’, which we can call a liminal period (Turner Mumbai galleries and artists, the boom’s end meant a 1987),3 as a social crisis that confused established severe decline in income. Nevertheless, they praised the distinctions, foremost that between art as artistic retreat from financial opportunism and overproduc- creation and art as vehicle for capital accumulation. I tion. It was seen as an opportunity to create lasting art, follow René Girard’s (1986, 1988) definition of a social a more refined audience and a mature set of institu- crisis as an ‘erasure of differences’. For Girard, the tional practices. collapse of normative distinctions, attributed to The tumultuous years were framed as a euphoric particular outsiders, throws the community’s valorized windfall, but one for which art insiders incurred a large self-beliefs – here the art world as a status-defining cost in the long run. Their ambivalence about this institution and arbiter of artistic taste – into question. In phase was repeatedly embodied by a particular, discur- this milieu, the outsider is the businessman, whose sive figure, the Indian businessman. This spectral figure lavish and indiscriminate art trading ‘polluted’ the was referred to by a variety of names: the ‘stockbroker’, community. In the recent past, this liminal figure was the ‘banker’, the ‘speculator’, the ‘wheeler and dealer’ seen to make dealers and artists money-hungry, foster and ‘fly-by-night investor.’ Omnipresent but invisible, overproduced, sub-par art, engage in dubious financial and invariably gendered male, he was a greedy indi- dealings, and drive art values radically higher, then lower. vidual of means and impatient acquisitiveness but no Secondly, I describe how, after this period’s end, art taste.

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