India's Tate Modern in Delhi!

NEW DELHI—As the developed world largely stagnated in 2010, the biggest feel-good story in the financial sector was the continuing rise of emerging economies, with interest surging in countries like India. Correspondingly, the Indian art world has continued its hot streak, with its market barreling ahead and 2011 kicking off with plans for a new — but still highly speculative — art facility being approved by municipal authorities in New Delhi. The project is said to be modeled after London's Tate Modern, which shot the British city's art scene into overdrive when it opened a decade ago.

Like Tate Modern, the new museum is to be housed in a former power station — the 33-year-old Indraprastha coal-and-gas plant, Delhi's oldest — on the banks of the Yamuna river. Unlike the Tate, however, the facility will be constructed as part of a 60-acre green redevelopment of the area, which will also incorporate rooftop gardens and office buildings powered by solar panels. Ten acres of the sprawling complex are reserved for forest.

Some estimates have the planned museum's cost running up to £70 million ($108 million), though this appears to be a guesstimate, as is the construction time frame, described as "three to five years."

Still, the Indraprashtha art initiative is just one among many landmarks that signal a continued deepening of India's art infrastructure. 

The most intriguing new development, however, has to be "the establishing of 'New Media' as a choice of medium for an increasing number of Indian artists." In a market still dominated by an attachment to the native style of modernist painting, new artists who capture the spirit of India's surging technological prowess are on the horizon, exploring "media technologies such as digital art, computer graphics and animation, virtual art, interactive technologies, robotics and even sciences such as biotechnology".

Source: Artinfo.com