Why there is no Indian Art Summit this year in 2010

In 2008, when the India Art Summit was inaugurated in the month of August, it was hailed by almost all Indian Newspapers as the most important Art Fair in the country. It was prophesied that the summit will make India a major destination for international art galleries. Agreements were made between many of India’s important art curators and dealers of that time and they all came together with generous blessings of the Government and organised a grand show.

But most pundits stayed out of the Summit. Important Galleries and auction houses made only a cursory visit. It is rumoured that to fill up the space, galleries based in New Delhi were given halls at throwaway rents at the last moment. Inspite of all these loopholes, the Summit was not entirely a failure as many of India’a budding artists sold good number of works and moderate galleries made good profits.

The limited success was expected to attract many more galleries the next year, ie in 2009. But recession set in and galleries like Bodhi, Sakshi, Delhi Art Gallery just vanished leaving investors chasing them for all their money. So Delhi Art Summit organisers brought in marginal and fringe galleries from many third world countries to fill up the space. The Star attractions were the sculptures of Anish Kapoor who had sent two of his small works at the request of one of his collectors. Another attraction was the sculpture park, where Subodh Gupta had installed some mammoth exhibits.

Again business was dull. But the organisers spread the gossip that a total of Rs 2 Crore worth of profits were reaped by the galleries. It is only a month later that gradually the actually figures started trickling out. It was then found that the two sculptures sent by Anish Kapoor was already sold three years previous to the exhibition. Also it was revealed that the Rs 2 Crose figure was many folds inflated and grossly inaccurate.

The organisers developed cold feet by now. By the middle of 2010, many more galleries have shut down. Instead a new trend is being observed where erstwhile collectors have started opening galleries. Why? In the hope that their accumulated stock of paintings would sell from these galleries.

The organisers of the Summit first tried to approach these new galleries but even they did not want to spend any money now. So The summit organisers finally dropped the idea of another summit. Now there will be only a summit in February 2011. But the fair does not seem very encouraging.

As of now, the galleries that are participating are the ones which had not been active for a very long time. Delhi based galleries like Gallery Ganesha, Espace and Art Konsult had not been seen for a very long time. They have not done any major show in the past three years. Another participating gallery, the Delhi Art Gallery does not have any gallery space any more and only have a web-site which too have not been updated for a very long time.

Mumbai based galleries Tao Art Gallery was closed for the large part of 2009 and 2010. The other galleries from Mumbai are Volte and The Loft, both very new.

A set of names like Gallery Mirchandani, Aicon, Gallery 88, etc are also not active and they are al looking for avenues to offload their old stock. So it seems that the Art Summit is most likely to be an attempt to offload old stocks, while there is very less likelihood of seeing fresh works.

Can such an arrangement help the Art Market? We cannot answer yet. In between there are the Commonwealth games, where too most of these same set of galleries will be showcasing their accumulated works. If  Commonwealth helps in some business, perhaps that will act as an indication for the Art Summit.