Art’s value is guaranteed by money, which doesn’t mean that without money it has no value, but that money value overrides art value, while appearing to confer it. Both art and criticism have been defeated by money, even though money gives art critical cachet, thus validating it as art. Even more insidiously, money has become more existentially meaningful than art.
In the last 25 years as a critic engaged in contemporary
space, I have realized that professional arts decline when
the patron-practitioner balance is radically interfered with
or when gross commercialism eliminates the pleasure of
practice. It drives the practitioners into other professional
spaces. In Bengal, we have a large cultural panorama;
which includes a great variety of art practice, both
professional and non-professional. There is broad or interrelated
presence of these; though, through the years, this
presence is dwindling especially that of household and
non-professional spaces, that are closely tied to a way of
life or value system. Sadly, there is no clay-worker in Bengal
at present, who knows the techniques of its
glorious terra-cotta reliefs that embellished
our village shrines only a few generations
ago