Between Love and Art Making: Photo Notes on the Business of the Arts

Art does not come to us in abbreviation. We do not take shortcuts unless the route works for us really. We stay grounded. We do not look away from life to look at art. We make art to make sense of our lives. Our needs for food and shelter are absolutely in place. We locate culture and make art in material practices within the everyday. 



Note 1: Artists are not losers. The cause of the arts is the premise from where we begin.

Conversations lie at the heart of learning. Passion means a hell lot to us. We do not, however, force the cause of passion. We simply look for like-minded people to share and create knowledge with. We do not stop at “me” and “you”, we speak of “us”. 

Note 2: We turn passions into professions through a collaborative approach.

By the Arts we mean an array of representations like painting, music, video and sound art, performing arts. We do not subscribe to the dominance of the visualist discourse. We refuse to be stuck in time.

“There is more to the arts than meets the eye. Yes, the performing and visual arts are supposed to be entertaining, but behind every creative endeavor exists a more profound concept without which a community shrivels up and dies: the arts remind us of our power to innovate.” – Management and the Arts, William J. Byrnes

Note 3: Making use of everyday technologies and resources, we choose to practice, promote, and manage the arts in and through the New Media. 

“The process of seeing paintings, or seeing anything else is less spontaneous and natural than we tend to believe. A large part of seeing depends on habit and convention” – Ways of Seeing, John Berger                                                                                                                                                          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk                                                                                                                                                                                                          Space and time are crucial to any engagements in arts and culture. A contemporary approach in the Arts takes into account the social construction of the guiding principles that shape its field of enquiry. A contemporary arts practitioner, manager, and enthusiast works in the present moment with an eye towards the future.                                                                                                      

Note 4: When we talk Art, we talk about infrastructures of art making and funding. 

Chronotope: “A term taken over by Mikhail Bakhtin from 1920s science to describe the manner in which literature represents time and space. In different kinds of writing there are differing chronotopes, by which changing historical conceptions of time and space are realised.” – The Literary Encyclopedia, Simon Dentith.

We speak of the field in the same breath with the archive. We believe in hands on training alongside creation and management of digital assets.

Note 5: This is an Arts Management programme curated in tune with cultural perceptions and practices in the Indian context.

In his Nobel Lecture titled “The Solitude of Latin America”, Gabriel Garcia Marquez spoke about responding with life at the face of “oppression, plundering, and abandonment...”  One of the most significant authors in the 20^th century was speaking here in the context of Latin America. But the spirit of his words crosses frontiers. “The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary”, he said.

Note 6:  We integrate principles and methodologies of Management and Cultural Studies into Arts Practice, Research, and Documentation. We craft our patterns of engaging with the Arts by tracing existent connections, and forging new ones.

Words and Images: Dr. Shubhasree Bhattacharyya- Assistant Professor and course mentor for Culture Studies and Arts Management Programme, Ramoji Krian Universe

(Shubhasree clicked these pictures, mostly on her phone camera, between the years 2010 and 2017 in her various places of work and travel in Gurgaon, Ottawa, Delhi, and Kolkata)

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Assistant Professor- A writer, sound-artist, traveller, and translator, Dr. Shubhasree Bhattacharyya specializes in artistic research, culture, and sound studies. A JU-SYLFF fellow, she completed her PhD in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University. Shubhasree has been a visiting fellow to Howard University and York University. An Eastern Zonal Cultural Centre grantee, she made a documentary film on songs of peddle husking. She has worked with the University of Delhi and Shiv Nadar University and has been a post-doctoral archival fellow with the India Foundation for the Arts. Shubhasree takes special interest in collaborative projects in the New Media and is currently curating an interactive virtual exhibition on work sounds.