#deepanjana

[grumpy-gran]

Of Jill Ciment's Consent, Neil Gaiman and Alice Munro

As we grapple with the allegations against Neil Gaiman, here's another perspective on what to do next:

[ittibittititti]

Sometimes, you can separate art from the artist. Sometimes, the art is the artist’s Siamese twin — distinctive and yet viscerally connected. Sometimes, you can see the monster in the art, but not the artist. Some artists are monsters and they've made great art, but that doesn’t mean being monstrous is fundamental to being creative. You could be a decent person and be creative. Sometimes, one's art is obviously related to one's life or personality or interests. Sometimes, it's entirely imaginary. Some art is valuable because of that autobiographical or historical angle. Some art is valuable because it is untethered to all reality. It's possible, maybe even essential, for there to be all these kinds of stories; for stories to resist any one unifying rule. It isn’t comfortable for us to be faced with the reality that Munro’s resistance was limited to her fiction and she couldn’t (or worse, didn’t want to) stand up to her husband. Just as it is deeply uncomfortable to realise that Gaiman, for all his insight and brilliance, is also a man who doesn’t understand consent and feels pleasure at feminine submission (maybe even inflicting pain).  - Of Jill Ciment's Consent, Neil Gaiman and Alice Munro, Deepanjana, July 2024.

Screencap from Twilight by Contrapoints on Youtube, March 2024

The separation of the art and artist becomes messier with artists who are still alive and creating. Often the phrase is used by modern creators as an excuse. They enjoy a person’s work but ignore their blaring moral issues.... For the artists who still have artistic power, we can’t empower their bigotry or harmful ideals and behavior. “Separating the art from the artist” should be used as a tool, not as an excuse. - Separating the art from the artist, The Ashbury Collegian.

[gbwhtspro]

Don't Miss These Feel Good Movies & Web Shows | FC PopCorn

Everyone has a film or show they go back to, for comfort. In the 2nd episode of FC PopCorn, Rohini Ramnathan, Deepanjana Pal & Suchin Mehrotra get vulnerable, revealing their favorite comfort watches of all time, and a lot more. Make sure to take note of their picks or just nod & smile in agreement.Tune into FC Popcorn, A Film Companion Original every Tuesday to listen to Film Companion critics…

[delhidreams]

A snippet from an interview with cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram (who was a magician before he became an ecologist) on the emergence magazine. Shared by Deepanjana in her email newsletter 'Dear Reader.' Do subscribe on Substack. She says, "Emergence has been one of the shiniest silver linings of the lockdown for me and their podcast archive is an absolute treasure. Abram speaks about animism and throws up so many interesting ideas, and I particularly love the parts where he talks about the alphabet as a form of magic." Magic it is. Or a curse, if you happen to read the book, 'Alphabet versus the goddess.' One of my favourites. . . . #nowreading #wordvyasa #deepanjana #substacknewsletter #substack #dearreader #animism #davidabram #emergencemagazine https://www.instagram.com/p/CE5mBv-hr6h/?igshid=1s0fbtfdr75nh

[knmadelhi]

One of the Most Interesting Places in Delhi KNMA Presents a New Digital Series

KNMA is one of the more popular Museums in Delhi and is like an ongoing art fair in Delhi. In its effort to promote Indian art Kiran Nadar Museum of Art has initiated its newest digital series to explore the intersection of art and technology.

This already well-received and highly successful art digital series is titled ‘Art X Technology’, which seeks to explore this intersection and examine the common ground where the two fields meet. The series will look at applying and engaging with technology and how age-old artistic traditions can challenge perceptions, create new aesthetics, melding the scientific and the creative while creating surreal worlds and beyond reality experiences.

The art world has evolved and so have Museums in Delhi from new media art in the 60ʼs, to more recently, the trending world of NFTʼs. With record-breaking sales and virtual exhibitions and art fairs, the connection between the two crafts is only becoming more robust, creating a new language of expression that reshapes the conventional idea of art. Institutions and individuals alike have successfully worked towards integrated technology in transforming the perception and outreach of art.

Moving away from dependence on a lattice of old-school influences, meticulously maintained by galleries, museums and critics, the series explores how art and constant technological developments lead to unexplored horizons that change the way we see, approach and experience art. This new hybrid creativity is moving to make art immersive, interactive, tactile and personalised.

Exploring this series by KNMA One of the most interesting places in Delhi, we talk to artists such as Hitesh Kumar from Splat Studios, AfrahShafiq, VisioniEcentriche, SehajRahal, MithuSen and Deepanjana Klein. They have pivoted their practice with the infusion of technology or continue to explore how technology is a new age defining art movement. The series kicked off on Sunday, September 12, with Hitesh Kumar, Creative Director of Splat Studio, continuing until October 10, 2021. All episodes are watchable on KNMA social media channels. Follow KNMA on social Media to be part of an ongoing digital art fair in Delhi.

[theincorrigiblemagpie]

Trials of Desi TV #5

I finished watching Made in Heaven late last night and I'm pleased to see Zoya Akhtar's work still continues to deeply piss me off.

Yeah, ok ok Alankrita Shrivastava and Reema Kagti were (I think) equal partners and I'm judging them equally hard.

But as someone who has only seen some of the latter two's work and pretty much all of ZA's, her patterns are obvious and so fucking annoying.

I'll get the good things out of the way first: the makers really do justice to having this sort of an ensemble cast and most of the arcs tie together neatly and interestingly enough for it to not have felt like a chore to watch 9 episodes. Everything looked super shiny and appropriately expensive. I'm all here for gorgeous women looking like a million bucks. And even while cringing at a lot of the shit on screen, I was invested in the drama in a "what happens next??" kind of way that draws me to a lot of 'masala films.'

Just...the gaze...is so deeply disturbing. The way it frames The Poors, in fascinated revulsion as it lingers on hardship, or straight-up othering people casually walking down the road, doing their own thing, to imply 'shady' area.

Yes, I'm subtweeting Kabir, who is SUCH an asshole OMG. Ok, literally every person in this show is some shade of asshole but Kabir pisses me off in particular, the sanctimonious, mediocre-documentary-making, hypocritical prick. Can you imagine one film festival worth its salt taking his 3rd grade moralizing behind the camera seriously? Or the fact that he's filming people without their consent (for his documentary)? And like I'm going to ooh and aah over trite homilies from a dude who picks on a woman for her language or desire to fit in or enjoyment of 'basic' things. Kabir is every dude I never want to interact with on the Internet.

And that's just what REALLY annoys me about ZA's films. They're so painfully self-aware of what the maker believes to be their cleverness, their compassion, their humanity, while failing to even recognize their bad politics. Note this pattern of the omniscient male narrator across her films. And it's so fucking smarmy, the way the narrative tries to manipulate you into nodding along with the incredibly fucked up politics. It's not that the characters are largely completely unlikable (I can roll with that) but that the show thinks it's being slick by pushing you to go "oh they're all terrible people but I sorta understand where it's coming from, y'know?"

Honestly, unpacking just how annoying and deeply disturbing this was and in how many gendered and casteist ways is going to take more time than I'm willing to spend on it, and I'm sure others have done it or will do it more eloquently. One great example I've read is Deepanjana Pal's break-down of what is so messed up about Tara Khanna.

In conclusion, I just want to politely request every Hindi filmmaker out there to stop dressing 'modern royal women' like Maharani Gayatri Devi. It's fucking lazy. (Much like a lot of the writing on this show.)

Oh, and 16yo semantix can't believe I'm saying this but stop trying to make Kalki happen. It's not going to happen.

[museumdelhi]

Interesting Places in Delhi

Exploring this series by KNMA One of the most interesting places in Delhi, we talk to artists such as Hitesh Kumar from Splat Studios, AfrahShafiq, VisioniEcentriche, SehajRahal, MithuSen and Deepanjana Klein. They have pivoted their practice with the infusion of technology or continue to explore how technology is a new age defining art movement.

[bollywoodhotcelebs]

Deepanjana Das

[pradeep]

On the overcoming of reader’s block.

[globalexpressnews]

Death Comes as the End

Death Comes as the End

Written by Paromita Chakrabarti , Anushree Majumdar , Pooja Pillai | Published: June 16, 2018 1:24:46 am

Hush a Baby Bye is authored by  Deepanjana Pal. (File) 

Books: Hush A Bye Baby Author: Deepanjana Pal Publication: Juggernaut Pages: 290 Price: 350

I came to Hush A Bya Baby after reading Naomi Alderman’s exciting (and terrifying) dystopian novel, The Power, about a world in which women set…

[samitbasu]

From a collaboration at Serendipity Arts festival, Goa. Curated by Deepanjana Pal, photos curated by Prashant Panjiar. / on Instagram http://ift.tt/2jX3mn8

[businessliveme]

A McKinsey Exec Built a 1,000-Piece Art Collection. Now He’s Selling

(Bloomberg) — Kito de Boer had been working at McKinsey for seven years when he moved to Delhi in 1992 to open up the company’s India office. “The reality of the job is that it’s pretty much all-consuming,” he says. “Or it risks becoming that. What is work—and what is not work—becomes quite blurred.”

And yet, together with his wife Jane, de Boer began to build a collection of modern Indian art that eventually surpassed 1,000 objects. It was a process that entailed criss-crossing the country to visit artists’ studios, private collectors’ homes, and far-flung galleries.

Now he’s beginning to sell it. On March 18, Christie’s in New York will auction 83 works, with an additional 70 lots up for sale in an online auction that runs from March 13 through March 20. The high estimate of the combined auctions is $4.9 million.

“We now have two houses, one in London and one in Dubai, and we’ve filled them with the bulk of our art,” says de Boer, who retired from McKinsey in 2014 and is now a managing partner at private equity firm Abraaj Group Ltd. “We still have a few hundred objects in storage though, and that feels like a shame.”

That, combined with the fact that you eventually “want to have less stuff and declutter and simplify,” he says, meant that it was time to begin to sell. “This is the first step,” de Boer says. “It’s a life-stage thing.”

To begin with, collecting Indian art also didn’t fit with the de Boer family’s lifestyle.

“When we went to India, we were in that sort of middle-class young household formation, focused on kids and nappies and all that stuff,” he says. “In addition, we were trying to process living in a completely alien and overwhelming environment. We didn’t go into it thinking we would become art collectors.”

The de Boers bought their first work—a small painting by the artist Ganesh Pyne—for about $5,000 in 1993 after being invited to a social event at a contemporary art gallery. “That was the starting point,” de Boer says, “but we also thought it would be the end point.”

At the time, $5,000 was a lot of money for the family, and he was working the aforementioned, infamously long hours. But “we did have walls to fill,” he says, and so, with Jane leading the charge, the couple spent two years buying art until they ran out of wall space and reached what de Boer calls “the moment of truth.” Despite having nowhere to put additional art, they continued to buy. “Passion became an obsession,” he says.

Top of the Pyramid

For many executives in de Boer’s position, the time-intensive nature of collecting art—or, for that matter, doing anything other than work—would have taxed his productivity.

De Boer, in contrast, began to view his collecting as something that could augment, or at least complement, his professional life. “It demonstrated to many people in the Indian community that we were serious about India, rather than just consultants coming in and knocking over the next gas station,” de Boer says. “We were something else.”

Moreover, he adds, “When you serve clients at a senior level, at the top of the pyramid, most of the discussions I have with them aren’t powerpoint presentations.”

The goal, he continues, is to be able to speak about a client’s business but also to talk about politics or art.

“If all you are is a narrow analytic consultant, that will get you through your first 10 or 15 years,” he continues. “Beyond that, you need to have more than one engine to get you to fly high. Art was an additional engine.”

Massively Undervalued

With his professional and personal lives so aligned, de Boer set out to purchase modern Indian art. While the couple didn’t have rigid criteria, “Jane was very clear. She said: ‘We buy one work at a time with love, and nothing else matters.”

Yet the two were acutely aware that “We happened to be present in an asset class that was massively undervalued,” he says. “We were not so wealthy that we could have an art collection and other stuff. I was probably the only senior partner at McKinsey who did not own any property. All of it went into art.”

“It’s quite a big decision not to buy a house and to buy more works of art,” he continues, “and I think that was a recognition, particularly in the early years, that this was an historic opportunity.”

It was, at least from a market perspective. De Boer says that he was buying works by Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde, the subject of a 2015 Guggenheim retrospective, for from $8,000 to $10,000 in the mid-1990s. Works by the artist now regularly sell for more than $2 million.

The Market

Most of the de Boers’ auction reflects the “modern” category of Indian art, which didn’t take off until the mid-2000s, says Deepanjana Klein, who specializes in Indian and Southeast Asian art at Christie’s.

That category “is still very young,” Klein says, “and it took its time. By the early 2000s, it was growing stronger, then took a dip in 2008.” (Others have called it a collapse.), The market has since regained strength, driven in large part, Klein says, from a combination of resident and expatriate Indians, the latter residing “in the tri-state and Bay areas,” she says. “Those two groups are the biggest supporters, in terms of collectors.”

That collector base has pushed up prices to the extent that the top of the modern Indian art market generally rivals the very tip of the art world: A 1972 work by abstract painter Sayed Haider Raza sold for $4.5 million  at Christie’s in March 2018.

The Sale

A piece by Raza appears in the de Boer sale; at a high estimate of $35,000, the work on paper probably won’t break any records.

Estimates in the live sale range from $500,000, for a rare, abstract work by Akbar Padamsee, to just $3,000 for a 1946 drawing of a seated nude by Francis Newton Souza. Prices in the online sale go even lower: A lush, 19th-century painting of the Punjab Hills carries a high estimate of $1,200.

“One of the themes of our collecting journey is that we’ve gone down the highways, as well as the byways,” says de Boer. “Many of the works we love aren’t the most valuable.”

The auction, he says, isn’t just about clearing house or making a return. He hopes the sale will help boost the market.

“We want to show that this can be much more than another alternative to pork belly or gold ingots, and an auction can do that,” he says. “I hope that people will get excited.”

The post A McKinsey Exec Built a 1,000-Piece Art Collection. Now He’s Selling appeared first on Businessliveme.com.

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[sankarshan]

I may be just a little biased, but this really is a most excellent pile. https://t.co/bcgJYaC49u

— Deepanjana (@dpanjana) July 15, 2019

[hari4games]

Tweeted

Love the way artist Priyesh Trivedi uses pop and classic Indian art: pic.twitter.com/136HtDSInz

— Deepanjana (@dpanjana) March 12, 2019

[ehteirik]

Liked on YouTube: "BoTcast Episode 28 - Contemporary Female Fiction with Deepanjana Pal" https://youtu.be/T_W-j38gZSA