Matters of Art
Art websites introduce Indian artists to a crowd of art buyers, finds Roshan Kumar Mogali
Not even the art world has been left untouched by the influence of the World Wide Web. Art websites that have spawned across the web have gathered a network of artists and art collectors and has introduced both of them to each other online.
Usha Shantharam, 52, an artist from Bangalore started blogging about her art in 2007 and discovered art portals over the following months. She says that most of these sites allow free sign-ups and keep sending you updates when any new activity transpires in your profiles on those sites.
Shantharam’s style is contemporary realism and impressionism and she usually works with oil and acrylic paints. Her profile on the site Fineartamerica.com allows visitors to leave comments about the artist and her artwork. She says that this helps her get useful feedback about her work from her followers.
Another liberty that these sites offer is that the artists can price their artwork according to their wishes. “Although some sites advice you on rates, most sites only ask you to price your art consistently across all the art portals you’ve signed up for,” Shantharam says.
The Bangalore-based contemporary art portal Artflute.com functions as a platform for art sale and blogging about art. There are more than 200 artists from India who have signed up as members. Suresh Kumar, a content writer for the site, says that a six-member panel of jurists screens artists before they are allowed to be part of the community, to maintain the quality of the artworks and to ascertain that they fall under contemporary art. He says that in two to three months the portal would be extended to a physical gallery in Indiranagar that would plan to exhibit artworks.
Shantharam says that unlike brick-and-mortar art galleries, online art portals allow a broader base of buyers for the artworks. The online gallery charges a commission and serves as a platform for the interaction and that is about it, she says.
The convenience factor is also a huge stimulation. In the case of conventional galleries, one needs to approach numerous galleries and deal with middlemen. “It is a difficult process and galleries usually prefer upcoming artists preferably from rural areas so that they could buy the art for less and sell it for a higher price. These galleries aren’t meant for city-based artists,” she says.
But online galleries are much more democratic and only ask that you upload images of your artwork onto their website. Last week, Shantharam updated her blog and three days later her Fineartamerica and E-bay profile with her latest painting. “It’s just much more practical,” she says.
Contemporary water colour artist Abhilasha Singh says her determination to not invest anything for the exhibition of her art drove her into signing up on many online art portals, prominent among them the art portal Artmajeur, which assigns the artist a dummy website of her own. “Not many artists who have just started out can afford to exhibit their work. The wise thing to do then would be to utilize the free sign-up of most online art portals and later use premium and extra benefits of these sites,” she says.
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