Creativity in Infrastructure An Auction House-Archive-University (2003)

After nearly eight years of work, there is a need to pause, given the leap of responsibility one is about to take within these coming months. The Osian’s Archive, Documentation & Research Centre (ADRC) for Fine Arts & Cinema should become accessible to the public by June, and the foundation stone for The University of Osian’s will be laid by August 2003. Thus the unique Auction House-Archive-University model will come into existence. It will be the first attempt anywhere in the world to build an Arts Institution on such idealistic and integrated terms, without seeking patronage from any of the three traditional pillars of funding, i.e. governmental, corporate sponsorship or private philanthropy. The question is its sustainability.

This brief note is also probably the first time I am sharing certain thoughts on one’s work in a relatively direct manner. At present I am thinking back to the obsessive innocence which drove me to return home, and how that passionate naiveté came to formulate its idealism, and how the conflict of idealism with practicality came to formulate its implementing strategies, and how these strategies needing to obey clear principles, have now come to clarify a much fuller context within which one’s evolving vision stays true to innocence, passion, idealism, strategy and principle, while serving a purpose far beyond the individual obsession.

Sitting in a distant British garden, India was always seen by myself as a great land, full of the curiosity to know the nature of the human mind and spirit, to pursue that inner voice without fear, to relentlessly search out the freedom of one’s spirit with great love for the process and all experiences, every kind, no qualification. It had that great jigar which could absorb all, respecting the individual stamina to be true to oneself while exciting the spirit to keep on pursuing different paths, enjoying the delights of all value systems, from an awe for nature and a respect for the smallest creatures, to a refined aesthetic which found beauty and subtlety in all things, all forms, all processes, despite a vast vulgarity rooted in pandering to the lowest common denominator. Soon these myriad delights would instinctively merge into a clarity allowing one to quietly smile, detached from all, yet deeply involved, able to inspire any one, yet having no wish to act or achieve. This in a nutshell was my romanticized perception of India, her responsibility to her people. I genuinely felt that she needed help in sustaining this journey, for with new passion and idealism, she best possessed the temerity to inspire the rest of humankind to move with a deeper universalistic vision, beyond themselves, to bring a love and joy into all processes which would instinctively solve many of the human dilemmas and tackle most of our material concerns with greater compassion and insight. Virtually upon these thoughts I returned home, after thirty years, in fits and spurts during 1994-5.

Since then, I have dedicated myself to grasping how such a vision was to be made into a living reality, for everything current seemed in great contradiction to the romance of those motivating thoughts. Also, as with all, there have been moments of disappointment,
and if I am to be blindly honest then at times I feel India has drifted too far into a mediocrity of spirit and action, making my early understanding of her a mockery, so feeling that all is genuinely lost, and at best we can just tend to our little garden, and let the vastness of India fend for herself, for she is out of hand, out of control, beyond the realm of any individual vision and action. But then the moment passes and I return to the reality that everything is indeed possible, that the deepest idealism is very practical, that the most stringent constraints can all be changed. If ever there was a nation of assimilation, though rooted in centuries of civilization and wisdom, it is India, having that limitless spirit to grasp all which was beyond and outside herself, and yet continually capable of returning to that which traditionally she has always tried to become.

And so I chose my little corner to begin battle, knowing full well that the later war zones are far off, and like all good strategies, we must create energy and make fertile the grounds in distant places before entering the heart of the pain. And as with all natural warriors of non-violence, an alternative value system rooted in a genuine creative life, capable of absorbing all with equanimity, with uncertainty always given the freedom to reveal herself on her own terms, seemingly in place, and waiting to be shared with many. Surprisingly, the Indian modern & contemporary arts were chosen as the starting ground. It was a subject I knew nothing about even as late as 1995. Yet, after many random insights and experiences came to coalesce within oneself, it was clearly evident that through this subject all the arts of India could find renewed energy and support, creating new linkages, revealing the unifying threads across culture, seeping into all aspects of society, over the coming decades.

Today, despite much progress in one’s work, the next objective still feels afar. The day India places the arts at the heart of her development policies still seems remote. The belief that within the value system of artistic creativity lies the answer to tackling many of India’s present and future dilemmas is recognized by very few. The deep links between creative introspection, aesthetics, ethics, economics, spirituality and wider developmental concerns, are barely appreciated, at any level, from the educational curricula of schools & colleges to the national polity. Economic and religious forces still have no credible creative counter, which prevents them from riding roughshod over all issues.

Thus the arts need to move even faster and deeper in building its infrastructure, its infrascape, as I termed it, because the contextual atmosphere and the love required is as pivotal to infrastructure building as any material underpinning of the arts. It is only when the arts will build their own infrastructure, on their own terms, without compromising their creative integrity, yet internally generating vast wealth to carry forward all the archiving, research, experimenting and disseminating processes, while not being dependent on the traditional pillars of patronage, that a genuine Indian renaissance of the arts and her aesthetics will be instituted. Without this renaissance no long-term credibility is going to emerge regarding the potential role of the arts in developmental policies.

Obviously, infrastructure building on this scale demands at least a ten to fifteen year horizon for the first phase, before it can be said that change is now irreversible, that a sustainable momentum has been created whereby all obstacles will be overcome. Now, eight years on, I finally do feel we are amid the flow of a genuine momentum.

When one’s work began in earnest during 1996, I had given myself ten years to build a great university for the Indian arts & humanities, from scratch, without the traditional support systems, evolving a new framework for academic research and artistic experimentation in five subjects - the Fine Arts, Cinema, Architecture, Philosophy & Literature – while simultaneously building the required financial self-generating systems, and step by step involving the intelligentsia and the wider public in different aspects of art & education infrastructure building. An Auction House was thus the first vehicle chosen for generating the required wealth; Osian’s was established in 2000, as India’s first Auction House for the Arts.

Yet, the traditional structure of the auction house as made famous by Sotheby’s & Christie’s was never seen to be ideal for the Indian context, especially given the early stage of the learning curve at which the collecting public of Indian art – domestic and international - found themselves. Also, becoming simply an agent was insufficient a role if a significant redistribution of wealth was to be put into place from day one. Hence, Osian’s also decided to tackle the key responsibility of market-making. Through the unique concept of the curated auction, one has been able to significantly restructure and re-prioritize the whole financial spectrum upon which the Indian art world today functions. This essentially became possible given the uncompromising focus one had upon being true to the history of the subject rather than promoting individual artists. Pricing was clearly linked to historical significance. History was laid open for the public to study, analyze and criticize like never before. During the last ten years the public awareness and respect regarding the history of the subject has grown exponentially. This historical objectivity became the bedrock of all market-making activities hence assuring the goodwill and trust essential for any successful auction house, especially one which takes a principal position in the subject. In times of rampant historical manipulation, this focus became all the more critical. In this regard our publications have become pivotal sources of reference & delight across the world, from student to scholar, collector to critic.

My earlier experiments with HEART (The Tuli Foundation for Holistic Education & Art; established 1996) and the belief that a charitable institution and volunteer individual efforts would indeed play a key role in art infrastructure building, though somewhat misplaced, were pivotal to the progression. Idealism was then at its most passionate and raw, to the point of being perceived as arrogant. That it took us nearly four years of running a charity as a self-generating concern, until one recognized the importance of material wealth at the age of thirty-five, and that too after being trained as an economist, is but a reflection of the great delusions idealism carries. That today I nurture one’s delusions as much as reason, is but another twist of the Indian story. However, the change in strategy was essentially triggered by the need to fight against various vested interests, embedded in a complacent and corrupt system. The experience finally made one realize that without the clarity and force of economic respect, no genuine material infrastructure for the arts (or even the gods) can be built. To most it may seem a simple and obvious realization, but for me, it came as a rude shock. Thus after Intuitive-Logic: The Next Step (1999) I decided to widen the approach and adopted a corporate, rather than a charitable structure to take forward one’s vision. It was the correct decision.

However, a sadness lay in the relative loss of innocence, in recognizing the limits of volunteer efforts as against professionalism, in losing a bit of faith in the public sector’s sense of fairness, despite recognizing the genuine idealism in many bureaucrats, even though their hands are tied on many fronts. It was also very clear that it was essentially within government that most of the individuals existed who genuinely perceived and recognized the concept of India as a holistic unit, who were constantly trying to see the larger picture, despite exceptions to the rule.

These early experiences served one well when the structure of Osian’s was being planned. It was to be a new redefined Auction House, which would generate sufficient revenues, which in turn would be redistributed so as to build the knowledge bases by which the arts would grow with increasing the public level of aesthetic discrimination, while simultaneously creating a credible and vast financial asset base by which a whole new re-engineering of the nation-building process could be initiated.

Thus, today both a world-class Archive & the foundations of The University of Osian’s can be seen to have emerged from an auction house, within three years. Thus the unique model of Auction House-Archive-University is now ready to be tested more severely than ever before. After all, it will only be after sustaining this second phase of cross-subsidization, with the bottomless pits called ‘Archive’ & ‘University’, that one will be able to speak of a new model for art institution building. If sustainable, the model will change the attitudes by which we grasp the arts, their potential role in the developmental framework & the processes for transforming individual vision into institutional formats.

In a way, few would believe the scale of risk, obsession and madness employed in building Osian’s. Thus I worry about its ability to become a replicable model to be bettered in a systematic manner. Further, the ferocious integrity, to the point of complete isolation, with which the process has been taken forward is also difficult to replicate. The greatest individual strength can also become the key institutional weakness. The single-mindedness initially isolated all, besides a few loved ones, to the point of forcing the public to believe the very opposite of the truth, for indeed truth is much stranger than fiction, and in India there definitely can be smoke without fire.
The key is never to react to public opinion when convinced of its short-sightedness and ignorance.

Anyway, as Osian’s now waits to be tested, I feel a few important guidelines need to be explained. Maybe it is best to clarify some of the key contradictions embedded within the practice, whose absorption is essential, and in whose reconciliation a fuller answer emerges so as to open out the next phase of growth. These issues have ranged from fusing individual obsessions with institutional discipline, charitable ethics with corporate efficiencies, intellectual & creative integrity with economic and financial due diligence, aesthetic subtleties with wider reach, a myriad fragmented egos with the need for a cohesive collective platform, the imposed scale and pace of India with the ambitions of an individual.

Firstly, having experimented with both the charitable and the corporate legal structures, I recognize benefits and disadvantages in both systems for building an arts infrastructure. Creating a new institutional entity and framework demands taking the best from both structures, but not in some piecemeal fashion.

The arts cannot be assumed to be a normal commercial commodity. It is a public good with very strong positive externalities, and hence normal market mechanisms in allocating scarce resources amid competing market ends is not the most desirable or effective way to deal with the situation. Further, corporate management frameworks, commercial valuation processes and institutional norms regarding the work ethic, especially those dealing with the specialization of labor, delegation of duties, motivation of human resources, sequencing of cross-subsidization policies, and the like, are all fundamentally very different in a corporate set-up as compared to an arts institution, especially on the terms suggested. Further, the lessons to be learnt are not so clear-cut, and can be very misleading.

For example, a very clear process of cross-subsidization and inter-linkages between cultural disciplines is required so as to build infrastructure, with correct sequencing of activities, with each artistic discipline already placed at a different stage of material development, and so each requiring different levels of support and awareness-building. Let us take the case of Indian film memorabilia. The interest and growing artistic recognition being received by the Indian film poster and the visual accessories of film making was initially only possible because of the piggybacking and cross-subsidization the modern and contemporary Indian fine arts provided the subject. Simultaneously, if the film poster receives greater aesthetic attention, it may become easier for the fine arts to reach a wider and more receptive audience throughout small town India. Obviously, this recursive process was only possible after the fine arts reached a certain aesthetic and financial maturity and public credibility. At the same time, the aesthetic and socio-anthropological interest in the film poster can only be sustained if a basic archival and documentation effort, mindset and respectability can be achieved within the film community. This in-turn demands, establishing a credible financial value for the items, without which little genuine effort towards the preservation and restoration of the subject will occur. All previous attempts at making the public fall in love with the art form of the film poster, to respect its rarity, uniqueness and historical significance, to take full advantage of its research possibilities, had minimal impact, simply because certain sequential processes of infrastructure building were not well understood; the aesthetic, intellectual and material priorities had no synergies.

The issue of finding the right balance between incorporating the values of a charitable and corporate institution, finds a parallel problem in the manner by which the intelligentsia has developed its (non) relationship with material wealth. The academia and the artistic community has always possessed reluctance to handling material wealth and its wider responsibilities. It is a norm of our specialized framework that patronage or some form of economic support is required from outside for the academic and artistic sectors, for the latter to survive and thrive. This assumption has led to the slow but sure disintegration of the potential of academic and artistic integrity to nurture a value system of its own, which in turn could act as the key buffer in disciplining the arrogance of economic and religious forces in daily life.

Thus, whatever the intentions of financial support, the point is that it carries a value system, which cannot help but compromise the significance and integrity of artistic creativity and intellectual rigor. The task is not to end all outside support, but to rebuild the terms by which the balance for internal self-sufficiency is established, hand in hand with building new bridges of dialogue and interaction with all sectors of society. Today, the power of knowledge is more than evident. Few can deny its ability to provide itself credible financial value. However, the task is to also build the institutional and legal mechanisms by which it can take on its own internal research and growth requirements from internally generated funds, while sustaining an ever-growing respect for its own values. Thus the intelligentsia needs to first recognize the scale of responsibility upon their shoulders, then they require to come together upon some cohesive platform, capable of absorbing all differences and bringing out a focus on common principles, and thereafter they need to set about rebuilding every facet of the educational curricula so that the learning process is completely re-examined, tackling a myriad issues, from the role of specialization of knowledge to the concept of art as financial investment, an asset from which a whole nation building process can be re-engineered.

By establishing iACEi (The Council for Indian Arts, Culture, Education & its Infrastructure), so as to help unite the creative intelligentsia, upon a common platform, and take forward many of the infrastructure building issues discussed herein, a positive step has been taken. Time will reveal its catalytic effectiveness. Regarding the valuation of the arts into a credible financial asset, so that one day even pension and mutual funds recognise the value and security in art, there still remains a maturing process, for the task is ongoing, but it will be fulfilled in the very near future.