TREE OF ART

A first-ever Museum Biennale is dedicated to the spirit of inquiry, exploration, and creativity

- ARMAN KHAN

Artists and patronages have always gone together historically, one cannot survive without the other – theirs is a symbiotic relationship. Particularly when one embarks to have the world’s first-ever Museum Biennale, organised under the aegis of the Government of Bihar between March 22nd and 28th, to be conducted in a hybrid physical-virtual model, the stakes are naturally high.

However, of late, there has been this notion of the arts having steadily declined, with patrons thinning, that the changed definition of consumption and production has stifled creativity. Dr Alka Pande, project director of the Museum Biennale, though, doesn’t necessarily subscribe to that view: “It all depends on how enlightened the patrons are. The U.K. has regenerated entire townships based on commercialisation of art. The economy of areas in East London depends on it. The relationship that cities and towns have with art tells the whole story.”

And so, the word must go out, a wide cross-section of stakeholders has to be on board. “The only way the arts can survive,” Dr Pande says quite categorically, “is through greater participation which can only come with greater commercialisation.”

MIRRORING INDIA’S DIVERSITY