Show At art auction works get no respect Rama Lakshmi The Washington Post An hour before the auction in a fancy star five-star hotel a frenzied flurry of activity grips the managers Where are the catalogs a woman shouts across the hall at pm p.m. I am slightly trembling whispers another sitting at a long table readied for phone bidding Sip coffee her neighbor suggests In the hall priceless Indian paintings of the past century are stacked next to giant garish movie posters and billboards showing guns girls and gore This unusual auction brings high art and popular low art under one roof Men in white gloves cautiously hold up Sisters a famous 1967 oil painting by Ram Kumar sort of an impressionist Indian Amedeo High-heeled High women in saris crowd around it and sigh Nearby young hotel workers stare transfixed at a painted billboard of three melancholy faces from the 1964 Hindi hit movie The mushy movie about two best friends in love with the same woman had seven songs and enough melodrama to move a generation to copious tears Ninety percent of our movie memorabilia is lost gone forever Weare We Weare Weare are a negligent nation when it comes to popular culture It is the largest film industry in the world but it is not considered worth preserving says the owner Neville Tuli who also keeps a cultural archive Tuli has about objects of movie memory posters costumes billboards booklets and props Two years ago h he e began including them in his es s traditional art auctions I have retrieved man many y r YX ui J JI I z r y r 1 M b r y ats w Washington Post photo by Rama Ranta Lakshmi Auctioneer Kapur left also an actor in house art-house cinema offers the billboard poster of a 1960 movie Oil paintings at the auction in New Delhi India brought as much as posters from poor people living in slums behind old cinema halls he says Many are from roadside who have hoarded them for decades because they love their glamorous stars Sanjay Dhar a spoken soft-spoken spectacled conservator talks to a patron about a print of the 1952 classic about a legendary medieval classical singer This poster is the Russian version of the movie Dhar says The art of poster- poster making in tin communist countries was very refined Just observe the fine fragile lines It belongs to an era when India and the former USSR were allies and they loved our movies The hall fills with women in chiffon saris and pearls and men in cool summer linen Kapur the auctioneer and an actor in house art-house cinema adjusts his tie and breathes deep It is sad that our film industry is not involved in buying preserving g collecting he says says I 1 send catalogs and invite them They say Great and hang up At pm p.m. the auction of paintings beg begins ns The faceless phone bidders are the most aggressive One by one the masterpieces are brought out triggering a collective gasp among the theart theart theart art enthusiasts Shivani a art dealer writes down the prices Sisters goes for a staggering Everyone applauds A surrealist painting by a reclusive Rekha Interim of Time goes for By 10 pm p.m. after paintings have been auctioned the movie images fill the room But the crowd thins out The have left The bidding price drops to a afew afew afew few hundred dollars The margin between bidders is much narrower than it was for the paintings sometimes as little as 12 f r This is like bargaining at a vegetable bazaar an onlooker says Some house art-house cinema posters of the Oscar- Oscar winning Satyajit Ray are sold over the phone for a couple of thousand dollars The popular cinema posters evoke nostalgia but do not move the money goes for and for the highest amount Nalini Kumar 51 a power company executive looks shocked when she sees the large gaudy orange-and- orange yellow campy billboard ofa of ofa a 1960 movie showing a woman nuzzled against the heros hero's chest What on earth is this Kumar exclaims turning up her nose I I watch Indian masala movies but is this something I can hang in my house Is this art It has come off the streets Behind her a restless man in tennis shoes Ramlal Agarwal 50 0 keeps changing his seat in in excitement nt asmore as f more and more posters are brought out He bids aggressively each time and bags for 1095 Please stop now I say nudges his henna-haired henna companion in a green floral sari speaking in Hindi It Itis Itis is so big where will you keep it itT Worry about that later Agarwal said with a laugh It reminds me of my childhood Imagine having my favorite film star in front of me larger than life In the back row a young man in a natty gray suit coolly acquires many of the movie artworks This isan is isan isan an investment says a hotelier Indian cinema is going to be the next big thing globally These posters will be priceless in about a I decade |