Art Appreciation (by Prof Anunaya Chaubey) is one of the courses that I am pursuing this term at the Young India Fellowship. One of the assignments is to visit the National Gallery of Modern Art, pick a painting and write about it, keeping in mind various criterion discussed in class.
I liked Satish Gujral’s Ecstasy, MF Husain’s Cyclonic Silence, an untitled work by SH Raza and a few other miniatures.
Upon returning to my hostel I thought these are big names, one could easily find their works online. Surely there must be scores of websites dedicated to their work.
How wrong I was.
Some of the foreign galleries have used technology and presented online viewers with a virtual tour of their paintings. Some other contemporary artists have their own websites showcasing their entire collection. The problem arises with artists, especially the Indian ones whose career span into decades. Websites are mostly maintained by fans, but there is again an inconsistency in the presentation, comprehensiveness or the regularity. And understandably so.
But I get a feeling that this must be the case with art in general. It is much easier to present music or text online. Paintings become a tough endeavor. The galleries don’t allow photography, and even if they are put up online, I am assuming the tagging done is so badly that it is virtually impossible to locate some of the earlier and relatively lesser known works online.
This however, might also be a worthy investment for a project. Perhaps by some like Soros’ Open Society Institute or perhaps Google itself. There should also be some crowdsourced medium where folks can upload the works of some of the great artists (to start with), so that there exist places, which aim to become the exhaustive catalog of these artists. And I think this is crucial especially from an Indian context.
