India Art Summit - India's Modern and Contemporary Art Fair

INDIA ART SUMMIT ART FAIR

(January 20-23, 2011 in New Delhi, India)

International art events are reminders or a celebration of recently discovered talents. People from all over the world travel to these events (Art Fairs, Biennales, Armory Show, Whitney, Venice, etc) to see the art and to mingle with the artists, curators, collectors, and other people in the art scene. For more information on international art events and festival refer to www.zeroland.co.nz.

The India Art Summit (IAS) is an international art fair takes place in New Delhi, India. Over 84 galleries from India, China, Germany, France, Japan, Australia, Pakistan, U.A.E., Latvia, United Kingdom, Italy, Switzerland, The Netherlands, and The United States bring in a group of curators, directors, artists, and art collectors into the mix to delegate the exhibitions. The organizers from IAS develop a floor plan for the event; this allows organization of space for each individual gallery and the works being shown.


Then the curators work with their alleged space, install the works, and mediate between audience and artists. The mediums range from paintings, drawings, prints, photography, sculptures, mixed media, installations, video art and performances.

Art Fairs and Biennales are found all over the world. The four most prominent locations for art fairs in the United States are located in New York, Washington D.C., California, and Texas. For more information contact your local art gallerist or university museum to speak to an art/ art history professor.

The Cool School - Walter Hopps

(photo: taken from Amazon.com)

The Cool School is first, and foremost, a documentary on the dos and don'ts in the art scene. It is also a biography of Walter Hopps, a legendary American Art director and 'first' curator of Modern Art in Los Angeles region. It focuses on the Ferus Gallery in L.A. around the 40s - 50s, an extremely conservative area, where the art community was completely invisible. *Spoiler Alert* In the end, the Ferus Gallery stops operating in 1966 and the artists that boomed from these exhibitions left their 'brotherhood' behind until recently (2007) when the film The Cool School was released.

Although the Gallery itself had not flourish in sales as it did in visitors, the past teaches one to not make the same mistakes, but make new ones. I personally enjoyed the grandeur of conversation in The Cool School. In a sense the film evoked a care-free, nonchalant emergence of the art scene through constant deliberation of artist and work selection (which artists are chosen for the exhibit), design (how the design of the exhibition was going to look), and audience (who will benefit from the exhibition?). This is something that interests me greatly: the power relationship/interaction between curator and artist; and how they build/ create/ fabricate a piece of history by exhibiting art objects. According to the film, this is also known as 'the art scene.'

I am also interested in the exhibition design that Walter Hopps uses towards the end of the film, where he exhibits Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup prints. The satirical placement of prints on the wall as if they were 'high art' (the kind that are French, Italian, and Spanish) like the "Masters" was the best part in my opinion. Similar to that of other controversial exhibitions such as "Mining the Museum" and "The Enola Gay." Although these exhibitions and Hopp's Andy Warhol Solo Exhibition were saucy and almost disturbing, they were so radically different that it shifted museology paradigm into an interactive and 'think-for-yourself' approach.

(REFER to http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/coolschool/film.html for more information about the film).