Short notes on art history and criticism:

• Most people don't talk about it, but the most thriving days for art criticism in India were in the 1920's when a heated debate on the formation of an Indian national style was being played out amongst art journals, popular literary magazines, and newspapers. (read Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850-1922: Occidental Orientations Cambridge University Press,1995). Today, a critical contestation over arts in the public domain is absolutely unimaginable. 

• Art criticism in India today essentially find two strands...in one mode the critic represents the artist like a suave court painter; the writer uses skills in rhetoric and imagination (often in collaboration with the artist) to weave a suitable context and bestow it with cultural capital. Such is the celebrated 'up market’ criticism in India, which helps to legitimize a certain kind of post-modern Indian art, which is rich with the possibilities exiting consumers through their value within a particular definition of multiculturalism.The other is a strand of independent writing mostly seen online. this is clearly a faltering platform; with writings mostly tending to be personal attacks on artists or institutions , whimsically patronizing or dismissive. 

• For gallery and artists, the legitimate position of the critic is that of a poetic reader into artist's works...his/her role entrenched in the need to need to work within negotiations between art, display, market and cultural capital. The nexus is so complex that almost every (possibly simple), art display sale venture feels the need to generate a larger context around it…masking the more direct viewing of art as a commodity in the financial terms by trying to cast it into a garb of 'culture'.

• The space for critical intervention remains marginal, and the market/art institutions have not shown any sign of engaging with a critic author, whose voice troubles the 'route' the dominant streaks in art production and market. This has become especially true since mid-90s onwards when the space for art criticism in popular print media began to disappear and the media became more interested in reporting art either as investment or as a Page 3 cultural nouveau, elite activity.

• Print and online magazines have created space for critical art history of contemporary arts, but the print media magazines (due to reasons of funding of the high production cost), hesitate to publish interventionist, alternate writings on art.  The online magazines, on the other hand, are a more discursive space. However, currently they suffer from financial instability (the online publishing industry in India is yet to take off), and are yet to ideologically position themselves vis à vis the mainstream. 

• As of right now there is complete lack of analytical understanding regarding the critical trends in the vernacular writing of the country and until such knowledge is assimilated, our understanding of contemporaneity in this country will be severely lacking.  

• There is a lot of discussion about art and contemporary thought generated online over social media. Often in the comments to many posts, one sees a rhizomatic structure of critical analysis.One should begin a  project  and see what methodological implications it leads to. 

• After 2008 and the stagnancy in the market for contemporary art and the settling down of the mediatic fascination, there has been a lot of interests amongst the artists community to engage with critics and historians...to get into an analytical inquiry into one's own practice.  (By and large) this new direction has not yet found teeth because the artists are still very much operating with in the gallery system. As more and more alternate art practices are emerging, the relationship between the artists and the historian is being strengthend.  

• I’m reminded of an observation by Anita Dube, “When the market is at its boom, criticism is at its burst. and when the market falls the value of criticism begins to emerge"