TAKE on art - January - June 2015
Get TAKE on art along with 5,000+ other magazines & newspapers
Try FREE for 7 days
Latest and past issues of 5,000+ magazines & newspapers
Digital Access. Cancel Anytime.1 Year$99.99 $49.99 Save 50%
Latest and past issues of 5,000+ magazines & newspapersDigital Access. Cancel Anytime.Get TAKE on art
Buy this issue $5.99
January - June 2015 issue Digital Access. 
Subscription plans are currently unavailable for this magazine. If you are a Magzter GOLD user, you can read all the back issues with your subscription. If you are not a Magzter GOLD user, you can purchase the back issues and read them.
- Magazine Details
- In this issue
Magazine Description
In this issue
What are the mysterious ways in which the art world works? It is undeniably built upon commercial transactions and consequently the market. The circuit gives the impression that it can easily be mapped by defining networks that include the dealer, galleries, auction houses, collectors and museums. Yet it is not as simple as that. Not merely because the art world in its current form comprises much of non-collectible, site specific and performance art (whose traces have found ways to even be commodified to generate revenue) but also because it is a complex system that encompasses commissioning, funding, production, labour, specialised-labour, conservation, presentation, lighting, display, travel, documentation, archiving, criticism and curation that escapes the traditional channels that commodities that can be owned traverse. The ways in which art can be marketed does not reduce itself to billboards, commercials or advertorials - the idea itself seems absurd. Auction houses, galleries and art fairs probably indicate a straightforward economy, but throw in the proliferation of biennales, foundations, residencies, and funding agencies, and the possibility that one work can simultaneously access all these spaces, we have an alphabet soup, not a sure shot formula of demand and supply.
Cancel Anytime [ No Commitments ]
Digital Only
Falling In Love (Again): India's Weaves Story
India’s love affair with handwoven cloth shows no signs of abating. Open any fashion magazine or newspaper and weaves get ample play. Designers up and down the country extol the virtues of weaves, proudly brandishing their innovative work with weavers to contemporise motifs and palettes. This is laudable but hardly surprising.
Regal Renaissance: The Royal Opera House Re-opens
The Royal Opera House Mumbai is widely touted as ‘Mumbai’s cultural crown jewel’ and India’s only surviving opera house. The original idea for the space was conceived of in 1908. It was inaugurated in 1911 by King George V, and eventually completed in 1916. The design incorporated a blend of European and Indian detailing.
Technologies Of Elegance
As soon as you enter the exhibition space in Bikaner House, the display ahead sort of takes your breath away. It’s a carefully crafted mise-enscène, filled with dangling screens, suspended sequins, overflowing jewellery boxes, glass displays, and more. And yet, in spite of the exquisite setting, and the props that inhabit it, your focus never wavers from the clothes, which form the essence of the exhibition.
Fictioning The Landscape: Robert Smithson And Ruins In Reverse
That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is – all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built. –Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey”
Kerala Boy
The Kerala boy stands alone, facing the sea or what looks like the sea. Water is never far from his feet. His eyes are dark and his hair is blacker than the best Tellicherry pepper. He is an inch taller than most and a little long in the tooth. He likes the language of protest. He likes the flavour of a season called ‘Left’.
Ghosts Of Ghan-Town
Landing gracefully on a rock, the camel tucked in its wings And wondered if this was perhaps Miryam Springs? This parched and desolate landscape was not what he hoped to find What of the flourishing settlement he had once left behind?
Delicate Animals
The humidity is sabotage and my skin is undone. I’ve always had a preference for dryness. While other women fear wrinkles, I never mind the beginnings of a crease. They seem cleaner, those intersecting lines. But then I’ve never been afraid of getting older, of being an abstraction.
The Smuggler: A Mural By Sadequain
The story goes that Sadequain (1930 – 1987), living in Karachi, was exhausted and in poor health. He was offered a stay at a government rest house at Gadani in 1958, so that he could recover. Gadani is located in the province of Balochistan on the Arabian Sea, a few kilometers west of Karachi. It must have felt quite remote from the city back then. The western coastline of Pakistan has long been infamous for underdevelopment and for unregulated trade activities with West Asia.
Complete Love
It’s 2011, late summer. All over Europe, young people are occupying central public squares to demonstrate for more social justice. In Berlin, their agenda is different. The completists gathered at Alexanderplatz aspire for justice primarily on an intimate level. They believe that only when the redistribution of material wealth includes equal chances of finding sex and love — no matter how elderly, disabled, or ugly you are — communism will become real.
A Writer's Discourse
There are two moments in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus that I come back to often. The first is an epitaph that Socrates uses to explain bad writing, which he recites (and I will now quote) in full:
