Contemporary Indian Art and the ‘Semiotic Eye’: Issues and Perspectives

Art in the Twenty-first Century This century has presented the arts to the scrutiny and experimentation of vastly divergent conceptual frame-works amongst artists, aestheticians, theoreticians and philosophical works.1 All of these relate to societies, relations within it and how art as a symbol exists amidst it all in a political sense. This has been an outcome of Art theory shifting towards semiotics, cultural theory and critical theory in the humanities since the late 1970s. These developments led to some thinking about the arts. As Carrier (2002, p. 46) states: Traditional critics were connoisseurs. Gifted with an eye, good at detecting forgeries, experts in Ming dynasty scrolls, baroque drawings or Abstract expressionist paintings guided novice collectors. So long as an artistic tradition is essen-tially stable, connoisseurs provide good guidance. But when new, non-traditional criteria for evaluation are demanded, philosophic art critics are required. Only a theorist can explain why a Duchamp’s ready-made’s, Rauschenberg’s 1950’s mono-chromes, or the American conceptual art and earth art of the 1960s are art or how these artifacts should be judged