An Artscape In Question

On a recent Sunday afternoon, when picnickers are enjoying the tranquillity of Bangalore’s traffic-free Cubbon Park, a small group of artists is gathered outside one of the iconic buildings bordering the greenery. They’re cutting up copies of an agreement and shaping them into papercraft—it’s their way of rejecting, and recycling, the government’s private-public partnership (PPP) plan for Venkatappa Art Gallery, Karnataka’s state art gallery. The stir, fronted by well-known artists, has been on for several weeks now but significantly, it’s also got some of Bangalore’s equally well-known names rallying on the opposite side.

Last July, when the Karnataka government unveiled a new tourism policy, it also entered into MoUs (memorandums of understanding) for private companies to adopt several tourism destinations as CSR initiatives, of which  Venkatappa Art Gallery was one. The government signed an agreement with the Tasveer Foundation, run by art collector Abhishek Poddar, giving it an initial five-year term to improve the gallery, bring in new collections and organise new events. The curators and the advisory panel of Museum of Art and Photography (MAP), a division of Tasveer, would govern the curatorial, exhibition and programming decisions. It’s this MoU that artists rallying under the VAG Forum want scrapped. They say it is vague, flimsy and without any safeguards.

“We are fighting for the cultural commons and our public space. This is a wrong precedent being set by the government. A public cultural institution is being given away, as a carte blanche, to a corporate house to occupy and rebuild. This has never happened and is against the public interest,” says sculptor-­photographer Pushpamala N. in an open letter. “It is a scandal that the state government, which has the res­ponsibility to run the entire state, claims not to have the money or expertise to run a small gallery...Karnataka has artists, art scholars and curators of high repute and vast experience.”

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, who last year had to back out of adopting the Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Mus­eum, put up an angry blogpost, asking: “Is it so hard to believe that there are those who wish to use their positions and access to funds to make Bangalore a better place? The world over, the cultural and educational sectors welcome the support of the private sector... Are we so pig-headed in Bangalore that we think our museums and galleries are fine institutions without need of modernisation, and that the government alone is doing enough?”

There have been plenty of questions and counter-questions on either side of the debate. For instance, why does art need to be subordinated to tourism? Why aren’t there enough artists using VAG though it’s affordable? Why can’t the gallery be funded by a pure philanthropic act or a ‘benign’ PPP like the Bhau Daji Lad City Museum in Mumbai?

While everybody agrees VAG has inadequacies which need to be addressed, artists feel they ought to be consulted, not others. Says artist Sheela Gowda, whose first two solo shows were held there in 1987 and 1993, “It (VAG) has been the ground for experimental work. It was so democratic that you didn’t have to go and apply somewhere, didn’t have to wait for some advisory committee’s reaction as to whether you can show there or not. It was accessible and still is. That’s the freedom we want to preserve.”

Tasveer, on its part, denies it’s a privatisation move, or a takeover, bec­ause the title stays with the gover­nment. Poddar said in a recent interview to the Times of India that the protests were surprising and that the allegations were based on assumptions. Pointing to the nine names on MAP’s advisory board—among them Dr Jyotindra Jain, Arun­dhati Ghosh, Arundhati Nag, Nirup­ama Rao and Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw—he asked: “Tell me, which of these people look like cronies of mine who I can tell what to do? They wouldn’t have touched me with a bargepole if they thought what I was doing was not for the greater cause.”

Says artist Balan Nambiar, “Many of the trustees have a stature in society but Tasveer Foundation of Art and Photography does not have a single artist or photographer on its board.” The protesters say they won’t back down until the MoU is cancelled. What happens next? Will it hurt the tourism ministry’s larger private participation plan? Well, there’s quite a collection of questions.