The art of conversation is not something that piggybacked on my DNA. It’s more like one evening when my efforts at making small talk may just about past muster and the next night, silence prevails. The other evening at the opening of an exhibition curated by Chintan Upadhayay (one of the new hotties on the art scene and mart) at Gallery Espace in New Delhi was more of a silent night.

The arterati, some of it international, was there in full force, this being the last day of what had pretentiously been called India’s first ‘Art Summit’: it was actually an art fair but never mind. An impresario of sorts, who glides smoothly between the worlds of music and art, oozing charm from every pore of her dusky skin, introduced me to a youngish man (desi, possibly NRI) with startling green eyes. This, as I said, being one of those days when words played truant, I got stuck after the hello-how-are-you bit and blurted out, “What do you do?” Pat came the reply: “I am a collector.” And then, silence.

Well, well, well…collecting art then, it seems, has become a profession, just as being a socialite usurped that status earlier — especially on Page 3. Being a venture capitalist, lawyer, scion of an industrialist dynasty or a trophy spouse of either sex is no longer enough these days when art talks as loud as money does. A big Raza or Tyeb Mehta on the wall or a few of Subodh Gupta’s steel utensils on the floor and you can be said to have truly arrived. To paraphrase Descartes, rather bring the old French philosopher up to date really: I collect, therefore I am. Tout simple. In a world where brands are the best calling cards — caste marks if you will — it’s time to go for the branded artists. After all, even the uber-luxury brands have begun to get ubiquitous — all coming soon to a mall near you. The lesson for the day: if you can’t afford (or don’t want) the artists who bring down the hammer at obscenely high prices, then try to discover the Next Best Thing. Play the patron, or spot the dark horses of the art world who will eventually gallop past the reigning stars. It’s not a bad calling card.

Surreal Evening
They came, they saw and they were conquered. The chattering classes and the spinning tops of the art world had flown into the capital from several corners of the country and the world to see the unveiling of the Devi Art Foundation, braving the unkind skies and the sultry weather. The mother and son duo, Lekha and Anupam Poddar — bravehearts both — had pulled it off with both chutzpah and elan. And I suspect with fingers many times crossed.

There it was, this curiously incongruous metallic, not-quite-finished structure in Gurgaon, the rapidly mutating suburbia of middling high-rises skirting Delhi. Instant ruin or retro-futuristic chic, the foundation with its veneer of weathering steel that, like a palimpsest, takes on the marks of time, is all set to be India’s first private contemporary art museum. The proposed one in Kolkata has yet to come up. And as for our National Gallery of Modern Art, well, the less said the better: you can’t get cutting edge with blunt knives.

Aesthetic rusting by design is just the right architectural note for this foundation conceptualised by architect Aniket Bhagwat. It spans two floors — over 7,500 square metres — of a corporate building. The Poddars would need an airport hangar to house their collection of over 7,000 works, 2,000 of them contemporary art pieces from the young Poddar’s endearingly avant-garde (if a touch iconoclastic) collection; the rest is from his mother’s folk and tribal collection. Enigmatically called Still Moving Image, the inaugural show of photography and video includes the work of 35 artists.

It was certainly a night to remember, surreal like a scene out of a Federico Fellini film. Alighting from SUVs, Benzs and elongated cars on to a dusty little road, the fashionistas, bluestocking art historians and the boldface crowd (not to speak of curators and gallerists, many of them goras) who had dropped by from Manhattan, London, Venice, Basel, Mumbai or wherever people come and go, talking of Damien Hirst and Subodh Gupta in the same breath, walked up into the strangely glowing building with a few towering flat columns placed at an angle to the building. These bulged outwards, like bits of an extroverted rib cage.

The surrealists would really have chuckled. Two anorexic young women tottering on heels stood outside what looked like a lift for quite a while, pressing what looked like a button until one of them had her Eureka moment. “Don’t tell me this is an installation!”

Perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps it was a lift-in-progress, like the building itself. Nothing was what it seemed that night which was, for me at least, an exhilarating roller-coaster ride through the imaginary peregrinations of several artists. Video art is a medium in which the artist can truly play god and follow his imagination wherever it takes him. And as this wonderful show cogently curated by Deeksha Nath from Anupam Poddar’s collection reaffirms, this medium has finally come of age in India.

Man of our times
It took its time coming though. There were no buyers for video art. Or indeed even installations, with the exception of the few daring souls like Anupam Poddar who were not thinking of secondary markets and auctions. Ferreting away insolite works of art, like a squirrel shoring up nuts for the winter, he has finally found a home to house them. He had no choice. Once he started collecting art — mainly installations and huge pieces of sculpture — his collection grew so big that, like the proverbial camel, it left no room for him in his farmhouse on the outskirts of Delhi. It was either them or him.

Clearly the talented Mr Poddar (his day job includes running a chain of hotels, including Devigarh Palace near Udaipur) is a man of our times. That night he wore an exquisite and subtly patterned black jacket. His surreal twist: it was made of paper and was to be worn carefully a couple of times before being discarded. Some would say that contemporary art is also ephemeral, with the Next Best Thing arriving, well, before you can say Next Best Thing.

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