Art in this era of globalisation is no more about creativity. It is more of a commercial transaction where paintings are bought, stored and sold at thousands of percentage profit. As with any business art too spews fakes, deceit and bad money. Read Amrita Chowdhury’s ‘Faking it’ to get a peep into the murky world of art business.
Weaving a plot around a DCBA (for the uninitiated it is Desi Clueless Back from America) woman Tara Malhotra, Amrita leads the reader into the dark corners of the world of painting, artists, the international middlemen, the so-called art collectors and patrons.
Tara is back in India after living in America for several years, with a challenging job in financial market. Her husband, Raj also in the same field gets a posting in India and expected Tara to just give up everything and follow. She did, but with deep resentment and wanting to get back at him. “Was it an Asian Woman syndrome” she wonders when she meets other “qualified career women giving it all up to become trailing spouses?”
The Malhotras have been collecting paintings when they were in the US. In India, amid the exciting and exploding world of contemporary Indian art, Tara decides to set up a gallery with a Gul Dastur. She gets introduced to a rather known art collector Roy Jordan. He had just hit the headlines for ‘discovering’ Amrita Sher Gill’s works in a dilapidated house in a remote village. After a few meetings and an attempt to get close to Tara, he tells her that he has found another work of Amrita Sher Gill and was willing to sell it to her. Tara falls for the suave talks and his newspaper reputation and buys the painting for Rs 60 lakh. Her partner Gul asks her if the painting had been authenticated by an independent source, putting seeds of doubt. She offered to get it done by her contact and takes digital pictures of the painting ‘The Woman in Red.’
This is where the story starts moving fast pace. The pictures declared fake by the analyst. Three suicides in different cities by unsuccessful artists and the recognition of Jordan by the acquaintances of all three confirm Tara’s suspicion that she had been duped. With her fledgling gallery, increasing distance between her and husband, playing absent mother to her son, she is determined to get to the bottom of it. A gripping narration that reveals the courage of the woman to expose Jordan, before he prompts another ‘suicide’. His modus operandi was like this – he would pick up talented young artists, preferably women, run affairs, trap them into painting fakes of big names, now dead. The authentication was done by a Danish art expert, well respected in the market. Jordan was running an international racket.
How Tara catches up with him, the CBI in his trail, his death in a private plane that took off in a hurry and the eventual swooping in on others involved in the underhand dealings make a gripping reading. She compels the reader to move with her.
Her encounter with school admissions, hunt for maids and drivers and flats are all full of humour. Real life. Good reading.
This is Amrita Chowdhury’s first novel. An engineer from IIT Kanpur she holds seven US patents for semi conductor fabrication. She now lives in India.
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