Krishna Shastri Devulapalli | Who will I be when I look at Souza?

A couple of years ago, at an out-of-town gig I was bafflingly offered (and unwisely accepted), I had to spend time in a space that had a lot of Art.

Art with an ‘A’. In fact, the space was so filled with Art that, had I needed to thump my idiot head to a bloody puree, an urge I felt almost immediately after setting foot at said venue, there was no wall remaining to do it on.

All valuable, super-tasteful, painfully curated art, I was told. By everyone who had been there before me. Which was a rare privilege in itself, apparently, if one went by the paeans written about the place and its equally artistic owner almost like it was a rite of passage. (Not too many write-ups about his unyielding fist – judging by how much I had been paid, though – I noticed.)

So formidable was the arty reputation of the person, so admiring the intakes of breath at his mere mention that one couldn’t be faulted for thinking his early morning efforts produced delicate art installations worthy of Sotheby’s.

After about half-an-hour of inescapable, overpowering art inhalation, I excused myself for a minute, rushed out into the anything but artistic street on which the establishment was ironically located and took deep, life-affirming whiffs of the overflowing garbage bin nearby. So many artists, so much imagination, so much time, so much love, so much sacrifice.

Nailed to those four walls. With apologies to Winston Churchill, never, I felt, had so much been created by so many for so few.

Call me middle-class, but I've always had a deep suspicion of art collectors.

At a very basic level, it is because I am yet to meet a man or woman (I include the tasteful, if ‘careful’, owner of the aforementioned establishment) who possesses valuable art who has struck me as, how do I put it, warm. And I have met many.

That got me thinking. Could it be because warmth (which is basically about giving) and a mindset that encourages hoarding (which is what collecting really is) rarely go together?

Because there is something cold, calculated and cynical about the collector’s process: totally ignoring Saraswati in early life – for how else can one ingratiate oneself to Lakshmi – and using the ruthlessly acquired, jealously guarded, disposable Lakshmi later to sidle up to Saraswati, feigning affection, appreciation, understanding ... only to grab her in a headlock and nail her to a wall.

The collector, as has recently come to light yet again (via Messrs Mehul Choksey and Nirav Modi, among others), is someone who equates art with imprisonment.

Art is to be possessed, he thinks.

Maniacally. And held hostage in his many homes. Art is to be shown-off, to philistine buddies who know even less about it than he does, at exclusive cocktail dos. Art is a boast. Art is libido. Art is a side-dish. Art is a framed cheque. Art is a concubine in his harem. To be swapped perhaps for more attractive models.

And in extreme cases, when space has run out, but the money hasn’t, art is a sex slave, procured by whatever means, to be stuffed away remorselessly into secret basements, lockers and pits dug in the garden.

Whereas what else is art but the opposite: freedom.

Let’s speak of Al Pacino for a bit. Because it’s always good to speak of Al Pacino.

In the ‘70s, when a young Pacino was preparing to play the role of Frank Serpico, the New York cop who blew the whistle on a corrupt NYPD, he apparently met the man and asked him what he thought was a pretty straightforward question.

‘Why didn’t you just take the money, the bribes that were offered to you, for a while,’ the actor reportedly said, ‘and give it to charity?’

Story goes that the real-life Frank Serpico fixed his soon-to-be celluloid counterpart with a gimlet eye and said ‘Hell, if I did that, who would I be when I listened to Beethoven?’

So who are you, my dear art collector, when you look at the Souza? Or the Husain? Or the Sher-Gil?