“Today you won’t have a name like Picasso anymore.” That’s the view of Sundaram Tagore, who was speaking at his gallery in Chelsea last Tuesday evening about The Future of Fine Art. “The age where a few artists command world wide recognition is over,” he said. “Each country is developing it own artists, movements and styles.”
The art market is not only taking off in China, India and Dubai, but also Latin America and Russia. Globalization has transformed technology and world economies and now is in the process of creating what Tagore calls a “seismic shift in the art world.” Fifteen years ago, New York’s elite art institutions, critics and curators dictated their terms to the rest of the world. “Today that authority and centralization no longer exists,” he said.
Now cities like New Delhi, Beijing, Taipei and Seoul have huge art markets. Tagore cited the new Kolkata Museum of Modern Art (KMoMA) as just one aspect of India’s thriving art market. Cities all over the world are now creating their own biennales or triennales. “Look at what Miami Basel has done. Last year over 300,000 people from around the world and 352 private jets flew in,” he said. “It’s crazy.” These markets are also a function of booming economies. While contemporary African artists are producing great work, their market is stalled because the citizens are not able to support it.
Foreign art markets still have a wild west quality. While artists in New York, London or Berlin are generally represented by only one gallery, that is not always true in other countries. An artist in China or Russia might be represented by as many as 20 galleries. “There’s a lot of flipping going on,” Tagore said.
When one audience member commented that art was just artifice, Tagore reminded us that art has been with us from the very beginning—from 40,000 year old cave paintings, to Gothic cathedrals and Renaissance paintings to the modern art of today. “Fundamentally, art will exist as long as humanity exists because we need it,” he said. “We can’t live without it.”—Sherry Mazzocchi
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