ALTHOUGH I CANNOT DRAW TO SAVE MY LIFE, I do find art therapeutic.  Viewing a picture evokes varied  emotions and sometimes the process has even helped me in looking at commonplace objects differently.  In short, I have always believed that art is indeed a celebration of life itself.  As the years have rolled by the celebratory mood normally engendered by a work of art has given way to cynicism particularly when I find it difficult to fathom what a particular work of art has tried to convey.  Sometimes, I have even wondered if contemporary art has enfeebled the intelligence of its onlookers.

A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO I HAD THE OPPORTUNITY OF VISITING the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).  The piece of art that I encountered at the entrance was a text inscribed on the wall in bold.  (See picture below).

The creator of the above work is Lawrence Weiner, a 72-year old American artist who is said to be a pioneer of what is termed as “conceptual art”.  In 1968, he formulated his Declaration of Intent which read as follows :

The artist may construct the piece; the piece may be fabricated; the piece may not be built; Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist; the decision as to the condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership. ( emphasis mine).

As I understood his dictum, it was entirely left to the viewer to judge what his work was.  Fair enough. But it is not easy as it seems because what may be entirely meaningless to the viewer, may be priceless for others – in particular for the key players in the art world.

AS I MOVED INTO THE VARIOUS ROOMS OF LACMA, LOOKING at various paintings, I  couldn’t help staring with disbelief a painting by Mark Rothko which was part of a series of monochromes of browns, maroons, reds and blacks.  Although the painting contained only blobs of colour brushed across the canvas, I was wondering whether it reflected what is generally claimed as “the deep mysticism” of the artist.  I was not permitted to take a picture of the painting in question, but it should surprise you that on May 15, 2007, the painting titled “The White Center” by Rothko was sold for U.S. $ 72.8 million to an anonymous buyer at Sotheby’s auction in New York.  (See picture below):

Robert Cottrell, in an engaging article titled “The Money of Colour” published in the Autumn 2007 issue of Intelligent Life said ” ..if you come across the White Center in a junk shop rather than at Sotheby’s you would need an expert’s eye to recognize it, unprompted, as a work of genius.”  He goes on to say that  ” ….great art does indeed have intrinsic value – but critical value rather than utilitarian value.  This is conferred by artists, dealers, critics, collectors and curators who make up what Olav Velthius, a Dutch economist, calls, “a political economy of taste”, and what the rest of us call “the art world.”……….There is an element of the emperor’s new clothes involved in assigning prices to art works with no obvious utilitarian value, especially new artworks – but this is something everyone in the art world understands.”   Cottrell quotes a New York art dealer who states matter of factly: ” When we trade with each other, we’re assuming that we, as a group, can determine the value of something that has no value-it is purely an agreement between conscious entities.”  The risk in modern art is of consecrating something absurd as a masterpiece.  The reward is in discovering an object, however improbable ( a pickled shark for example), that turns out to have staying power – and proves to be a work of genius after all………At the very top end of the art market, both taste and money are highly international.  The more readily capital can flow around the world, the more of it can compete for the top art objects, wherever they are……Inequality of wealth may be at least as important to the health of the art market as general prosperity, because only very rich people have the money to chase prices sky-high.”  Small wonder that the biggest buyer of art in the world is Saud bin Mohammed bin Ali al-Thani the former ruler of the State of Qatar.  Tom Wolfe aptly said that contemporary art world is a “statusphere”

MORE RECENTLY, ON MAY 11, 2015,  a Picasso painting   “Les Femmes d’ Alger” was sold at the Christie’s auction in New York to an anonymous buyer for U.S. $ 179.4 million. (See picture below):

Reflecting on the auction, John Gapper, in the Financial Times of May 14, 2015 wrote:  “The financial value of any work of art remains as unknowable and intangible as the Mona Lisa smile…The only way to prove that you are the kind of person who is both cultured and wealthy enough to own a major Picasso is to buy one.  Auction houses prosper by holding it in front of you briefly, while offering it to sell it to your rival…”   Apparently, art sales in 2014 had touched USD 51 Billion.   Gapper says that the Picasso painting in question is an extraordinary work of art but whether it is an exceptional investment is another question.  Other than the major players in the art world, in modern times, it was the renowned economist J.M. Keynes who popularised the idea of investing in art (he was incidentally married to a painter) and there are many who have followed suit.  In India, Gurucharan Das was an early bird to pick up several paintings for Proctor and Gamble and globally Deutsche Bank has established its reputation as a major institutional investor in art.

WHEN I WAS ASKED TO SET UP A BRANCH IN NEW DELHI in the late nineties for the institution where I worked, after much persuasion, I was sanctioned a princely amount of Rs 3 lacs for purchase of paintings out of the total office interiors budget  of Rs 75 lacs.  I picked up a few paintings from the Dhoomimal art gallery at Connaught Place  and also sourced a few paintings from local artists directly.  The CEO had asked me to search for paintings that depicted Kubera, the Lord of Wealth, since the organisation was a financial institution but I found none. Some of the paintings were indeed abstract but pleasing to look at – and  I had taken the precaution of asking the artists in question to write down for me what the paintings meant since  my superiors would demand to understand the stuff  that would adorn the office walls !!  After the paintings were hung, thankfully no one approached me for an explanation.

NOW HAVE A LOOK AT ARTIST TRACEY EMIN‘s installation “My Bed” (1979) which is now part of the Charles Saatchi collection. (See below):

Ms Emin competes with Lady Gaga for shock value.  She is said to be the doyen of “confessional art”.  To quote her own words, “my problem is that I can’t keep a secret” and she admits that she is “a raving expressionist.”  When you consider that Ms Emin has a first class degree from Maidstone College of Art and an M.A. from the Royal College of Art besides having collections in MoMA, Pompidou and Tate Galleries,  you cannot help wondering about the state of art education and indeed if “anything goes” in the name of art.  In his engaging work “What Are You Looking At: The Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 years of Modern Art” by Will Gompertz, a former Board Director of the Tate Gallery, writes : “Tracey Emin’s unmade bed “made her”. She became notorious, a love to hate character for the media, which she manipulated expertly, becoming very famous and very rich along the way. She took her chance. Hers was a generation that wasn’t going to wait for something to turn up.  They’d make it happen..“

DESPITE THE ODDITIES IN ART THAT I HAVE ATTEMPTED to outline above, one must keep one’s eyes open – there is no reason why glorious works of art  should not emerge in this angst-ridden world of ours.  After all, despite all claims to the contrary, there is some truth still in the dictum ars longa  vita brevis – art is long, life short.

HOW POTENT CHILDHOOD INFLUENCES ARE !!

WHAT BEGAN AS A STRATEGY to calm down two restless brats at home – me and my younger brother with only a year and a half separating us in age – ended up quite differently. Nearly four decades ago my younger brother and I were shepherded into the Bal Vihar classes conducted by the #Chinmaya Mission in Mangaluru. The class was ably conducted by Mrs Sunanda Shastri, mother of my elder sister’s classmate. She had assured my sister, who in turn had guaranteed my mother, that the two brats in question would quarrel no more!

THE BAL VIHAR CLASS COMPRISED OF 30-35 children aged between 5 and 15 and was held every Saturday between 5.30 and 7.00 pm, if I remember correctly. That was also the time when most children were out at play ! The class would begin within an identification of a good quality – sadguna – and its opposite : durguna. For about five minutes, the class would breathe in the sadguna and exhale the durguna. Soon this would be followed by recitations from the Vedas and the Bhagavadgita. In between several bhajans and kirtans in praise of the various deities in the Indian Pantheon – Shiva, Ganesha, Saraswati et al would be sung in unison  with Mrs Shastri in the lead. We were also taught how to recite the Venkateshwara Suprabhatam and the Bhaja Govindam. For nearly 6 years, without missing a single class, until we obtained our Secondary School Leaving Certificates, every Saturday, my brother and I attended the Bal Vihar classes. As we entered the portals of college for higher education, we were rather over aged for Bal Vihar classes and we did not feel emboldened enough to attend the next higher level of learning – The Study Group of the Chinmaya mission.

INTERESTINGLY, ALTHOUGH WE STOPPED ATTENDING THE BAL VIHAR classes, my brother and I continued reciting the Venkateshwara Suprabhatam every morning around 6 am at home and we usually ended up reciting a chapter of the Bhagavadgita after the evening prayers. Soon we landed in our respective jobs and there was no one to recite the slokas at home be it in the morning or in the evening. It was left to my mother to chant the non-denominational devotional hymns of #Sree Narayana Guru which she continues doing even today at the age of 95!

THE BAL VIHAR CLASSES ARE THE BRAINCHILD OF #SWAMI CHINMAYANANDA whose birth centenary is being celebrated this year. It was #Chinmayananda’s idea to inculcate spirituality in Indian homes by getting children to be familiar with the Hindu scriptures, particularly the #Bhagavadgita. Indeed his institution, the #Chinmaya Mission is one of the foremost institutions in the world today spreading the message of the Bhagavadgita besides establishing educational institutions all over India.

BY THE TIME I COMPLETED MY GRADUATION, I had already become an agnostic but attendance at the Balvihar classes had already drawn me to devotional and classical music without my consciously realising it. Indeed it also got me interested in grappling with questions of life and death. I ended up becoming a lifelong “seeker” and I cannot really say that I have found all the answers. But I owe a debt of gratitude to Swami Chinmayananda and the Chinmaya mission for hardwiring within me a certain kind of discipline, a certain awe of the universe, and inculcating in me a perennial sense of wonderment about the world around me.

TODAY IF I LOOK AT EXISTENTIAL QUESTIONS, I suspect it must be on account of the “early grounding” in “spirituality” that the Bal Vihar classes triggered in me and to this day I look forward to watching with enthusiasm any new lecture, say, by #Swamini Vimalanandaji or #Sunandaji posted on You Tube and if I am still keen to acquire the #Rig Veda Samhita Vol I to III just released by Dr Prasanna Chandra Gautam through the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, it is largely due to the curiosities triggered by attendance at Bal Vihar classes more than four decades ago.

FOR MY ABOVE INTERESTS, I OWE MY HUMBLE PRANAMS to Swami Chinmayananda and Mrs Sunanda Shastri, the conductor of Bal Vihar Classes nearly four decades ago at her beautiful home “Triveni” in the town of Mangaluru.

I HAVE NO HESITATION AT ALL in admitting that I always applaud what I like.  I suppose this is the case with most of us and  it should not be embarrassing.  However a pithy comment by John Kay in The Financial Times  of  April 22, 2015 set me biting my nails and scratching my head.  “We are all subject to confirmation bias,” Kay wrote, ” – a tendency to find or interpret facts to support our opinions we already hold.”  Kay was expounding on the term “truthiness” – term coined by the American political commentator Stephen Colbert.  “Truthiness takes us further. There is a profound egoism about truthiness.  These are beliefs we hold not because they look true to me, but because they look true to me.   A statement is truthy if it is held valid independently of any evidence.  Truthiness is the belief that comes when conviction is prized over information.”   Although Kay was writing in the context of the behaviour of British politicians against the background of the imminent general elections, his piece set me thinking for hours and several of my biases and beliefs floated across my mind – to say that I was embarrassed would have been an understatement!

I KEPT WONDERING IF THE ABOVE THOUGHT PROCESS associated with truthiness forms the key ingredient of all propaganda – be it in politics, art, or advertising.  Indeed when truthiness is repeated often, it jostles alongside competitively at the level of the plain truth itself !  There is therefore a lot of substance in the statement which says that “sometimes you need to distance yourself to see things clearly.”  Equally, one must learn to see things how they are instead of how one hoped, wished, or expected them to be.

KAY MAKES THIS IMPORTANT POINT –  the sincerity of a false belief does not justify unfounded allegations against others and he paraphrases an interesting quote from P. J. Rourke:  ” In modern times, truthiness – a truth asserted from the gut or “because it feels right” without regard to evidence or logic – is also a big part of political discourse.” I wondered for a moment if Rourke was trying to summarise the India of today in one sentence !

WHEN WE BUY A NEW BOOK WRITTEN BY OUR favourite writer or spend time at a matinee show watching a film made by our favourite director,  truthiness can sometimes raise its head unknowingly. Even if the book or film was indeed mediocre most of us would have difficulty in admitting  that we wasted our time in reading the book or watching that film.  Coming to think of it, although it is easier said than done, we would be able to see life more clearly (and therefore find it less disappointing) if we make earnest efforts to rid ourselves of confirmation bias and truthiness – the real enemies of reason.

A FRIEND WITH WHOM I DISCUSSED THE ABOVE THOUGHTS warned me that one would make more enemies by trying to reason things out with others as the ground reality is quite simple : birds of the same feather flock together.   The existential choice is either to embrace the truth all alone or wrap around ourselves with the spurious comfort induced by our faith in truthiness.