ABSTRACT
Contemporary art can be defi ned, as Ranjit Hoskote suggests, ‘by certain global conditions of culture production. . . that is produced within the circulations of the residency system, the travelling exhibition, the research proposal, the museum, and, perhaps most importantly, the biennale’ (2012: 60). The work produced within these conditions tends to be ‘in the form of video, installation, photographic project, performance, and the social project’ (Hoskote, 2012: 60). Notably, painting is not included in Hoskote’s list. One of the diffi culties for understanding painting within this context is the medium’s long-term connection with both modernism and the art market. For Hoskote, the latter is certainly the problem in the context of India’s art scene, which has only really emerged (and fl ourished) following economic liberalization of the late 1990s (Holborn, 2009; D’Souza, 2013):
[T]he marketplace of discussion. . . remains conceptually thin at the popular level, dominated by market-obsessed reportage rather than discerning criticism [. . .] Few observers seem to have the time or patience for a more sophisticated analysis of the painting’s potential confrontation with its institutional ethos of reception, or the video’s possible absorption of painterly qualities, both of which features would destabilize any easy assumptions about the ‘modernism’ of one or the contemporaneity of the other.
