By Kiša Lala
Artist Subodh Gupta NYC 2011 photo: Kisa Lala
The economy of art is viewed with suspicion in a country where most still struggle with the basic necessities of survival…an onerous responsibility to bear for one of India’s top selling artists. Still, such social concern seems disingenuous looking at the media’s general ambivalence towards the fortunes spent by its own elite on weddings ($50 million extravaganzas). India’s surge in the contemporary art market is a sign of increasing luxury and leisure for its fattening middle class. The romance of poetry does not register on an empty stomach.
The moon does look like a big pizza pie to most of India. Well, more a chapatti. Speaking about his monochrome painting depicting empty plates of leftover food, hung at his recent exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, Subodh Gupta said, “It’s like the full moon; left over plates, inspired by street vendors who use thalas to make chapattis – it’s a tabletop photograph.”
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