Indian art is seeing queer developments in the name of curation in the capital city of Delhi. Without any historic leanings or background, without any artistic education of any kind, a new breed of curators has taken over the art market. Commercial considerations have hijacked intellectual aesthetics.
 
In Delhi, there are gallery owners (housewives), administrative heads of galleries, institutions and so called event managers who have all turned curators overnight. The new credo is ‘have money can turn curator’.
 
‘The equation of the artistic insight and practices suffer, and the curating exercise gets reduced to a mere ‘hunt and gather' activity where everyone makes money,’ says Dr. Jyotindra Jain, who heads the Institute of Aesthetics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University.
 
In a number of shows during 2005-06, it has been made amply clear that the value of the term curating has been brought down to a vulgarity that reflects neither intellectual nor artistic grit. Curating then has become a kind of self–promotion–in which an artistic archipelago is being created– as self-proclaimed curators, with networking capabilities, zoom in on the art market to ‘put together’ shows that have neither a thread of continuity nor a curatorial vision. Then there is the literal translation of intellectual ignorance, which is dictated by curatorial control. Often curatorial titles have nothing to do with the works in question. And worse still is the space that you can buy to get the media to write about you. Thankfully, the few critics who write do so with independence. 
 
Interestingly in the recent past, curators also tried to be the ones who brought out particular artists. Of course, one can’t really say there is anything wrong with that but the commercial interest of including ‘hot artists’ causes a narrow focus to emerge among curators, who attach themselves to a group of artists “tested and true” and become part of a monetary `must have' canon.
 
‘As a curator, it’s your job not just to provide the local artists with good exhibitions, but also to give them opportunities to exhibit with international artists,’ said Subodh Gupta just before he left for Basel.
 
Interestingly, the activity of this self-serving curation also becomes a platform in which the curator develops and pushes her /his own agenda in being a recognised name. In that case, the curator also wants to be part of the buoyant tide of the marketing miracle, to be with the successful artists who emerge with them.
 
In early days, curating was about a battle between the book and the mind, in which the mind focuses on getting artistic practice out of the white cube and into myriad cultural spheres. In the city of Delhi, curating has become an exercise in the politics of hanging in which power relations and control are expressed by how many artists agree to participate and how well they sell.