‘ArtEast’ for Artists and Art-Lovers

After a long and patient waiting, our cynosure of the eye is finally about to come out. I’m talking about ArtEast – the newest addition to the list of art magazines in India. As a general rule, any productive idea normally faces a whole host of questions challenging its position and the very notion of its existence, much before it comes to exist physically. And ArtEast is no exception to it. “Why another magazine of all things?” “Don’t we have enough work left for our artists’ to concern themselves?” “Isn’t there enough printed pages to be wasted every month on gossip columns?” I hope we cannot do away with them – for, they create a convincing ambience for a start up.

We received queries about the title of the magazine, and especially because of the pun with the word ‘artist’. However, a friend of mine who normally maintains composure was unusually worried about the title. “Did you name it that way because it’s going to come out from Eastern India?” But I reassured her, saying, we have no intention to exhibit a provincial narrowness. In fact, the very title for the magazine was coined to hint at a somewhat bigger world – Asia, or the eastern part of the world. ArtEast, would therefore cover features, news, reviews and other articles related to art from contributors all over Asia and India.

However, to my mind this leads to a more rational sharing for the Eastern part of the country with the rest of India as well. For so far only a handful of writers from the city and only a couple of them from Shantiniketan have been amongst the regular contributors to art magazines circulating from the Northern and the Western part of the country. They had to reach out to the other parts of the country to prove their worth. Readers got a flavour of what the writers from the other parts of the country have to say through magazines coming into the city and never having invited authors as ‘participators’ contributing /catering to Eastern India’s interests/ideas. From the point of an art historical orientation too, the city’s institutions greatly lack in (in fact, of the nine significant art institutions in West Bengal only two so far offer scope for specialization in art history and it is only at the Department of Art History at Shantiniketan does one witness an adequately formulated curricular matching the demands of specialization in the subject).

In Calcutta art reviews covered by critics are more often than not, journalists. Institutionally trained art historians are a rare phenomenon still. Consequently, regular columnists who write on art in the city based editions hardly get critiqued or face any challenge from across the country. What prevails now is a state of self-complacency when it comes to art criticism.

Often, a more serious set of art writers go unnoticed because they write in a vernacular, which, needless to say, is regional. A willing journal ensures the scope of translations. It becomes necessary to know the views of concerning our art by our people. By this, I mean, an immediate circle of people and their views on art in their immediate surroundings – how do they respond to it.

In terms of space (i.e. space allotted to art criticism in the print media other than a specific art journals), too, art criticism often dwells precariously at one corner of any periodical or journal that the city based editions bring out. Subject to gross negligence, the contributors in these spaces can afford a word limit amounting to a maximum of 150 words (as is often the case in The Telegraph, Metro and the Bengali edition of the India Today magazine) and virtually gets away by writing out an extremely sketchy and loosely written piece – a mere description of the work of the participating artists at a given show. The worst affected victims are the students in the art institution in the Eastern zone. For, in most cases, they tend to follow these lazily generalized pieces as they are produced by ‘eminent art critics’ and apply them in their own answer scripts, constantly narrowing down as well as jeopardizing their own scopes to emerge as art connoisseurs, after a six years rigorous course in the Visual Arts.

We are looking forward to any feasible changes that the new magazine might just bring about.

(ArtEast will be headed by Samik Bandyopadhyay as its Chief Editor with an advisory committee comprising of Jogen Chowdhury, Pranab Ranjan Roy, Priyabrata Deb and other eminent personalities. The magazine is a concern of Pratikshan, a publishing house based in Calcutta.)