Market memories: Collective memory and art market change in Mumbai

This article examines the role of collective memory in mediating market change. It focuses on the experiences of Mumbai artists, dealers, and curators as they remember a recent period in the art world’s collective biography: the “boom” in India’s emerging art market that culminated in 2005–2008. Actors rely upon their diverging interpretations of the past, and the performance of these memories in the present, to make sense of marketization and to express ongoing conflicts and inequalities among art world actors wrought by these processes. Their memories articulate a threefold experience of art’s marketization: acceleration, art as spectacle, and standardization.
Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Mumbai and focusing specifically on a shortlived but influential art gallery of the boom period, Bodhi Art, as a key memory site in the Indian art world, I argue that memories mediate ongoing anxieties and conflicts related to the marketization of Indian art that, while discursively located in the boom period, actually relate how the market has come to be centrally embedded in practices of art production, display, and exchange in art contexts around the globe.