Cheekily yours: Mr X on a South Mumbai gallery's shady dealings

Much of the art world is aware how this South Mumbai art gallery used questionable tactics to amass an impressive collection of artworks over the decades. Paintings by medicore artists would help garner sales. But promising, upcoming artists, who submitted their artworks with hopes that the biggie would get them places, almost never saw their works again. After repeated enquiries and frustration with the absolute no show in sales, some would close the chapter quietly, not wanting to take on one of India's prominent art spaces. That'd finally leave the gallery with a free, huge collection, all of which was sneakily added to the gallerist's personal collection. More persevering artists kept doing the rounds to the gallery, at times for years. When their determination would be paid off and they'd be summoned to collect their artworks, they'd find a number of the paintings from the returned lot missing. To top it all, they'd receive a heavy dose of gaslighting. Say, if the artist deposited 25 works, the best 5-7 were snatched up, and the rest returned. When questioned about the remaining, the gallerist would fabricate a tale that only 20 works had been submitted.

But one artist, with a fiery temper and a repertoire in art politics and activism, decided to call out the gallerist. One night, he downed a whole bottle of Old Monk neat, to muster enough courage, went to the art doyenne's building at 4am and began to hurl expletives and profanities about the gallery's questionable modus operandi. To shush him, the gallerist called him to the apartment, and returned every single artwork, a total of 40. It's said that from that point on, the scheming has finally trickled to a halt. But once bitten, twice shy artists, some say over a 100, still caution excited newbies.