[Reader-list] Demands and Dilemmas of Durga Puja ‘Art’: Notes from a Contemporary City Festival (Golden Jubilee Lecture by Tapati Guha-Thakurta)

[Praveen Rai]

Centre for the Study of Developing Societies

invites you to a Golden Jubilee Lecture

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*Demands and Dilemmas of Durga Puja ‘Art’: *

*Notes from a Contemporary City Festival***

by* Tapati Guha-Thakurta***


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*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 analyzed 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.*

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*Parul Dave-Mukherji* is Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics,
JNU.

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Praveen Rai
Academic Secretary
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29, Rajpur Road
Delhi - 110054
Phone: 91-11-23942199
Fax: 91-11-23943450
www.csds.in
http://www.sagepub.in/browse/book.asp?bookid=1843&mode=1