Sordid trends?

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Last week this column highlighted the lack of art of protest in the post-globalised world. This week we look at the other side of the coin, that is the ‘decline and fall’ of ideologically driven art.

There was a time when the artist was a rarefied being, considered and considering himself above the sordid mundane field of commerce. This sentiment has died a violent death at the hands of gallerists, auction houses and indeed artists themselves.
The idea of the artist starving in the garrets, post-industrial and Eurocentric though it may have been, did have enduring value even in India. For a large number of people who are practicing visual artists, this may well be true, but for the handful of artists who have any recognition in the public there are considerable commercial rewards.
And a concomitant development has been the lack of ideological commitment through art. Art through the ages has been inspired by religion and after Renaissance by various ideas based on enlightenment, industrialism, humanism, empiricism, with ideological leaning as varied as hedonism to nihilism interpreted through art movements such as Dadaism.
During the heyday of communism, there was a wave of Social Realist Art glorifying the human achievements of community economic endeavour, and in the post World War period, there was radical feminist art that not only rejected patriarchy as a social and ideological tool of oppression but more constructively reveled in the special feminine essence.
Today we may have an odd artist who claims to be working for a cause; but consistent commitment to a particular ideology is largely missing. In the globalised era, with its emphasis on cultural hegemony and global markets, it is difficult to find the impassioned paintings of Satish Gujral, J Swaminathan and Ram Kumar who painted with an object to change the human condition by interpreting it through their art.