[Sarai Newsletter] Golden Jubilee Lecture by Tapati Guha-Thakurta at CSDS

[The Sarai Programme]

The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies invites you to a
Golden Jubilee Lecture*
*

*Demands and Dilemmas of Durga Puja ‘Art’: Notes from a Contemporary
City Festival*

by *Tapati Guha-Thakurta*

*
*

*Parul Dave-Mukherji* will chair

Thursday, 25 July 2013, 6 pm

CSDS Seminar Hall, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054

Please join us for tea at 5.30 pm


In view of the transformed profile of the Durga Pujas as one of
contemporary Kolkata’s biggest public art events, the lecture
critically interrogates the categories of ‘art’ and ‘artist’ in this
field, considering both the *compulsions* and the *difficulties* of
their insertion into this domain of public festivity and mass
viewership. It asks: to what extent does the frame of the ‘aesthetic’
enable the transformation of the ephemeral ritual icon into a ‘work of
art’? How effectively can it mediate the commercial publicities,
promotions and competitions that have invaded the current economy of
the Pujas? How does ‘art’ provide a special form of branding of the
contemporary festival and what specific kinds of identities of
‘artists’ and ‘designers’ has it nurtured in recent years? How do the
Pujas turn our gaze on the many less-elect forms of artistic
livelihoods within and outside the city, alerting us to the
ever-slipping lines of distinction between the ‘artist’ and the
‘artisan’ in such spheres of work? And, what kinds of vocabularies of
the ‘vernacular modern’ lie waiting to be analysed here?

*
*

*Tapati Guha-Thakurta* is Director and Professor in History at the
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. She has authored *The
Making of a New 'Indian' Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in
Bengal* and *Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in
Colonial and Postcolonial India*. She is currently completing her
book, *In the Name of the Goddess: The Durga Pujas of Contemporary
Kolkata.*

*Parul Dave-Mukherji* is Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/newsletter_mail.sarai.net/attachments/20130724/348bc918/attachment.html>