Why Artists Need To Stop Looking To The West For Validation?

Why do critics, curators, collectors, artists and historians in India tend to judge a work according to the dictates of the Western canon.

- Madhu Jain

When The Guardian art critic dumped Bhupen Khakhar’s paintings in the same category as that of ‘second-rate British artists’, there was much agitation amongst the art cognoscenti in India about his unequivocally dismissive review of the late artist’s retrospective, which recently opened at the Tate Modern in london. The gauntlet thrown by the frequently acerbic but astute Jonathan Jones stung and caused quite a flurry — like setting a cat amongst pigeons. But his reaction, one which we might initially be offended by, also raises an important question: why do so many Indians continue to look to the West for validation — nearly seven decades after Independence?

Why do art critics, curators, collectors, artists, art historians and lovers here tend to judge a work according to the dictates of the Western canon? Why must the opinions and whims of art writers, museum curators and institutes in London, Berlin, Paris or New york matter so much? In a perceptive post on social media, Waswo X. Waswo, the Udaipur-based American artist, makes a cogent point about the need for and confidence in ‘India’s own history of modernism’.

Bestowing Importance

The American artist’s remedy is really quite simple, and doable. Prestigious art museums with good infrastructures in place would be able to carry out the vital task of bestowing ‘importance’ on contemporary art and artists in India, discouraging the seeking of stamps of arrival and approval and being at the ‘mercy of outsiders’. I totally agree with Waswo.