Vadhera Art Gallery, one of India’s top ranking galleries has opened an exclusive Book store for art related books and periodicals. For the time being, Vadhera book store is having a total of 1200 title to chose from. This will include the include Vadhera’s own sponsored publications like “Made for Maharajas: Design Diary of Princely India”, “In Conversation with Husain: Paintings”, “In Adoration with Krishna”, “Jogen Choudhury: Enigmatic Visions” as also western publications on masters like Goya, Picasso, Monet and Francis Bacon.
Art literature in India is in a very nascent stage and most of what is published are sponsored by galleries to boost their own sales. Often an artist who has a book written on him or her is considered a good artist in not only India but probably entire Indian subcontinent. Noting this, many galleries have in the past three years have published books on their own artists. Such books hardly cover any true assessment of the artists and the reader gets nothing better than false eulogies written by paid writers.
We have thus seen a book on Paresh Maiti last year that claimed to have chronicled Maiti’s travel to Kerala. The book hardly tells much about the artist and for a serious reader of art such books can provide no real information. The book was launched before an exhibition and was thus meant to have very limited purpose of boosting sales of Maiti’s works. Such books are hardly any better than catalogues of exhibitions; only these have more pages and are hence more expensive.
Following the big galleries, many others had followed suit. Among the many artists on whom books were published included Manish Pushkale, Harshvardhan, Riyas Komu, Chintan Upadhyay, Bose Krishnamachari and many others. All these artists are new faces in Indian art and the time for such books were probably way too immatured. But the show continued. One estimate says that more than a thousand books on these artists had come up last year alone.
Vadhera Book Store is now bringing these books in a store. This is not likely to hel the real readers of art. What is more interesting is that the store keeps books of only those artists who are in Vadhera’s camp. Thus the store is likely to end up into a propaganda paltform rather than a true book store. The managers of Vadhera are aware of this and hence they do not expect much sale of these books either. To keep business running the store is thus selling posters, postcards, even handbags, art inspired fashion accessories and phone covers with prints of important paintings.
This assumes relevance as faced with recession, many galleries are now converting part of their galleries into book-stores, boutiques, etc. Hyderabad based Kalakriti Gallery had a book store for a long time. This is also true for some of the Bombay based galleries. But none of these galleries are into serious book selling business. The art-book business is thus more of a veneer for propaganda for in-house artists. Serious readers are not likely to benefit.
