February/March, 1998
No. 033/VI/98
cover story
Galleries Galore
The boom in
contemporary Balinese
art
Why bourgeois Balinese
are collecting art
beyond
bali
From Toraja to the
Togians
Sulawesi's most seductive
parts
Treading Lightly in
Lombok
Tips to being a green
tourist
regular
features
Weekender
The Saltmakers of Amed
Home Grown
Legian's Legend,
Made Kasim
Health and Beauty
The Ubud-based
Bali Utama Spice
Books
The search for the Great
Bali Novel continues
Cuisine
Bumbu Bali cooking
school
Fiction
Marni's Ride by
K. Landras Syaelendra
Jungle Drums
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In Bali, the gallery has become not simply a public space or a way to educate people about high art, but has also solidified new social statuses by creating an audience and selecting those members of the public who will be admitted into its exclusive domain. The gallery functions as a barometer of taste and fame, a way to measure the modern day sakti (metapphysical power) shown when one is brave enough to enter this sacralized realm. This sakti is conferred on those artists and appreciators able to enter networks of collectors, art managers and gallery owners and score an invitation to the modern-day ritual of the exhibition. Middle class patrons speak of empowering artists, helping them to make it in the global market. But isn't it perhaps the artists who are empowering the gallery? When the eccentric painter Ida Bagus Made turns down most of the galleries trying to buy his work, he becomes a symbol of the critique of the commodification of art and the standardization of creativity. But at the same time, his refusal to accept a price makes those few works of his available almost priceless.
In the gallery, art is not simply bought and sold. Paintings are carefully positioned to incite a longing to possess them. The viewer flirts with the images, feeling attraction build and desire rise. Going home with a painting is not just an economic exchange but a matter of jodoh, the result of something fated to be. According to my friend the art critic, the art of buying a painting is just like the art of finding a wife. But although both are priceless, the painting can be hung permanently on the wall.
by Degung Santikarma
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