Art Attacks

Book excerpt: Since the end of the 1980s in India, self-styled representatives of a variety of ascriptive groups—religious, caste, regional, and linguistic—have been routinely damaging artworks, disrupting their exhibition, and threatening and assaulting artists and their supporters. Often, these acts are claimed to be a protest against allegedly ‘hurtful’ or ‘offensive’ artworks, wherein its regularity and brazenness has led to an intensifying sense of fear, frustration, and anger within the art world. Art Attacks tells the story of this phenomenon and maps the concrete political transformations that have informed the dynamic unfolding of violent attacks on artists. Based on extensive interactions with offence-takers, assailants, and artists, the author argues that these attacks are not simply ‘anti-democratic’ but are dependent in perverse ways on the very logics of democracy’s functioning in India. At the same time, they have been contained, at least until now, by this very democratic system, which has prevented the spiralling of attacks into an outright condition of art plunder.