‘Maths and Science are extremely important aspects of everyday life — but
art and culture is what we really live for’
Traditional art, in simple terms can be understood as art that has prevailed over time amongst a specific set of people — owing to their skills and abilities to work with materials and ideas. Most of the traditional artforms of today are one’s that gained popularity before the arrival of modern art and its contemporaries. The interesting part however is the richness that traditional artforms carry.
Most traditional artforms have evolved with time along with stories, myths and memories. Traditional artforms are often narrative descriptions of real-life events — attaching a deep emotional value with respect to the people of the community. One of the most important aspects of traditional art today is the artist itself — recent years have seen a decline in interest with respect to traditional art which has led to a decline in the number of artists practicing these artforms.
The arrival of digital art has made the scenario further stressful for artists as popular culture has ignored their presence completely, apart from a few artist collectives across the world, the imaginations of what an art or an artist can be have been limited to modern and digital art.
Despite these emerging realities, the fact of the matter remains that traditional art needs to be preserved — not because Naksh is an NFT marketplace for traditional artworks, but because they are pieces of our history. Traditional artworks contain more than just visual beauty, they have texture, material and history — something that has been missing from most artforms that have been prevalent in recent times. In addition to the cultural shift, the advent of multimedia apps such as Instagram have also contributed to this phenomenon.
Some extremely popular Indian artforms that have borne the brunt of this culture are Warli, Tanjore and Kalighat among others.
From the side of the state or central governments, there have been very little to no efforts over the years to pass legislation that favours the artists and the art ecosystem — something that shows the lack of priority these elements of our history are experiencing.
By this point, it is safe to say that a growing NFT marketplace catering specifically to this niche could be a huge boon in terms of supporting the artists and the art form itself — and that is exactly what we are.
Naksh aims to establish an ecosystem which can positively preserve these rich histories of Indian art which appear to be actively fading away — and at the same time, catering to the betterment and larger progress of traditional artists along with it.
