Indian colours on foreign shores

[June 04, 2006 at 0015 hours IST] NEHA SHARMA for THE FINANCIAL EXPRESS.

After Sotheby’s and Christie’s, it’s the turn of Indian galleries and artists to travel abroad to promote their works

As India continues to be on its growth trajectory, one area that has surely milked the benefits of its robust economy is the country’s art market. A lucrative proposition, art today has emerged as a potential long-term investment both in the national and international markets. Cashing in on the emerging market are the Indian art galleries and artists who are making their presence felt in the international market. The next upcoming show will be organised by Gallery Art Alive at Air Gallery, London. Representing varied schools of art and backgrounds, the exhibition to be on view in mid-June, according to Art Alive owner Sunaina Anand, has been designed to showcase Indian art, which is rooted in the soil but has a contemporary outlook. “We are taking a group show of six senior artists including Yusuf Arakkal, Arpana Caur, Jogen Chowdhury, Anjolie Ela Menon, Paresh Maity and Prabhakar Kolte. We are investing Rs 45 to 50 lakh on the show and are expecting it to do a good business,” says Anand. Says artist Arpana Caur, “I have done a Buddha with water drops falling from his hand on a line of fire, especially for the show. My other works will be also on display.” Apart from Indian galleries, Indian contemporary art is spelling good business even for international auction houses. Interestingly, it’s not just senior artists ruling the roost. The recent Christie’s auction in Hong Kong, for instance, also showcased the works of young artists like Jittish Kallat, Bharti Kher, Atul and Anju Dodiya, Sunil Gawde and Ashim Purkayastha. “After introduction of international sales of modern and contemporary Indian art in the mid 1990s, the market has grown from under $1 million per annum to over $20 million this year so far. Prices have risen significantly for the most sought after Indian artists,” reveals Catherine Manson, director, Press Department, Christie’s Auction House, London. In March, Christie’s auction of 120 Indian works in New York brought in $15.6 million and the recent auction of works by Indian and Arab artists held in Dubai ended up raising more than $4.5 million. Sotheby’s, on the other hand, pulled together a total of $7.96 million for artefacts as well as Indian contemporary art at its auction.

While the figures indicate a well-established international market, art connoisseurs believe that it is still at its nascent stage. “Though both galleries and artists are promoting Indian art at individual levels, the cost of holding a show, including insurance, freight, artist expenses, gallery rent, administrative cost and travel, is one of the major factors affecting business in the international market. Sometimes the galleries fail to recover even the cost incurred on organising a show,” says curator Alka Raghuvanshi. Agrees Anand, “Last year we showcased the works of Thota Vaikuntham in London. The response was amazing but we ended up being in a no-profit, no-loss situation.” While most galleries are zeroing in on the contemporary Indian art and themes, some senior artists do not essentially buy the idea of making a conscious attempt of selling art in the name of aesthetic and cultural attributes attached to the country. Says Yusuf Arakkal, who has been exhibiting his works in the international market for the past three decades: “I don’t think there is anything called as Indian art or Western art. Cultural influences are bound to follow but it does not necessarily restrict an artist’s imagination into fixed parameters. An attempt to thrust a style or an idea only makes it unnatural.” Further commenting on the reception of his works Arakkal says his “works have been entertained very well and the market is equally encouraging.” Adds Dr Alka Pande, curator, Visual Arts Gallery, “Indian art has a huge potential and what is further adding to its popularity abroad is the fact that artists are not just concentrating on specifics. Their works capture a global image, which does not restrict itself to any particular demographic, social or economic milieu, thus attracting art enthusiasts across the globe.” However, though one cannot predict the sustainability of the growth levels, as seen in the recent past, Manson asserts that the signs are healthy as the market has increased over 100% last year. “If good works of art are correctly estimated and well presented to the market, which has both demand and depth, there would be no dearth of buyers including NRIs and international contemporary art collectors, apart from the country’s domestic lot,” says she.

Accessibility pays rich dividends...

Today’s art market reflects a number of new tendencies. The best place to buy art directly is the artist’s studio. The advantage is that authenticity is assured and the middleman’s profit is cut out. But the disadvantage is that the range of good works available in studios is necessarily limited. Galleries are the best places for collectors to access a wider range of artists. Of late, monopolistic tendencies are overtaking galleries. Being attached to a gallery an artist does not have to bother about sales. If the gallery concerned pays a retainer, it is a huge increase in the artist’s security. The monopolised artist becomes dependent on the gallery. And it manages to get a special source of supply of an artist’s work without having to compete with others. This also helps the investor. First, access to a sufficient number of works is necessary to invest in. This is one of the major reasons Souza, Raza and Husain have crossed the Rs 1-crore mark. Rarity of a work or its special quality may have enormous value for the collector, but accessibility is the most important element when it comes to investment. So the new art monopolists catering largely to investors will find room to develop as specialists. Also, as the base of our contemporary art market is still expanding at a considerable pace, the negative principles of monopolies will for some time remain merely a trend of specialisation for better competition, which is something that will not allow the investment market to be controlled by a few big names. This process is evident from the catalogue of Saffronart’s online auction of May 10-11. A Husain Horse series oil on canvas priced at Rs 43-64.5 lakh (lot 4) compares favourably with the prices achieved by Subodh Gupta, Chittrovanu Mazumdar or Atul Dodiya. One can be sure that the negative principles of monopolies will neither affect range nor creativity. But for how long the process will survive depends on the capacity of the market to expand. Investors can help to do this by dove-tailing 25% of their funds to stocking young artists with a consistent track record. This will allow development of big names of the future and contribute to long-term returns of a high order. As is evident from the Saffronart action, pen and ink drawings have a wide market. The inclusion of of Himmat Shah, Akbar Padamsee and B Vitthal is a welcome invitation in that direction. So we need not rely on the limited choice monopolists will restrict us to.

Article Courtesy: FINANCIAL EXPRESS.

Let a million museums bloom!

[April 21, 2006] JAMAL MECKLAI for BUSINESS STANDARD.

NEW DELHI: The good news, if it can be called that, about the recent wild and (to many) incomprehensible run-up in art prices, is that it has—finally—drawn attention to the woefully inadequate art infrastructure in the country. Anyone who reads the trite and popular press, which by now includes ALL our major media players, has heard of Tyeb, Raza, and Souza—Husain, of course, has long been an independent icon. However, few people have actually seen paintings by them, and fewer still have seen high-quality reproductions in art magazines or books. Thus, in the country at large, there is very little understanding—or, more importantly, “feel” —of what these painters are about. In other words, almost nobody knows the value of Indian contemporary art, while everybody knows the price. A classic situation created by runaway markets, aided and abetted by the explosive growth of the Indian economy and an evolving group of right-place-at-the-right-time hucksters. So, where does it go from here?

Well, first off, to do a little huckstering myself, I have learned that while two living Indian contemporary artists—Tyeb and Raza—regularly (?) sell for more than a million dollars; there are only 30 or 35 global living artists who regularly break this limit. Thus, 6 per cent of the uppermost echelon (price-wise) of global contemporary art is Indian—by an interesting coincidence, this is more or less the same ratio of Indian companies (33) in the Fortune 500. Thus, using this single—and, admittedly, arcane—metric, the Indian art market and the Indian equity market are about at par at the top end. (The second price tier artists, by the way, are not as populated with Indian names as the second tier of businesses; thus, for you punters out there, there’s still an opportunity at the 100-200,000 dollar level.) The more important issue, of course, is whether these prices are high in absolute terms and whether they reflect genuine—i.e. sustainable—value. Well, first off, value in art—I would, indeed, say in life—is totally subjective. I remember many years ago seeing a painting in New York by the then-celebrated Jeff Koons, which had an uncanny resemblance—in terms of how it affected me—to a painting I own by a local artist called Abbas Batliwala. To me, they were near identical in value, but the Koons was over 100 times higher in price. To somebody else, there would doubtless have been a different equation. Thus, I believe there is no objective measure of value. The closest I can get to finding an objective measure of value is time. If something—a work of art, or otherwise—remains in favour for decades or, better yet, centuries, it becomes a classic, with enduring value. Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, the Ramayan—these are all unarguably classics. In contemporary art, Picasso, Pollock, Warhol would be slightly less unarguably classics. And, classics, of course, command what could be considered insanely high prices; I believe the highest price ever paid for an Andy Warhol was 17.5 million dollars—that’s nearly Rs 80 crore, more than 10 times the Indian record.

Now, how are these prices sustained? Who pays such huge sums of money for a painting? Well, first of all, there are many very wealthy people in the world who simply love a work or love the idea of owning the highest priced Warhol in the world or both. But, more importantly, much of the action at these ridiculously sublime levels of price is the result of institutional buying. Museums—public and private—are the key to underpinning the art market, and it is the distribution-side of museum activity—through which hundreds of thousands of non-wealthy citizens get access to and familiarity with “great” art—which ultimately enables an otherwise simply highly-priced painting to become a classic, to have enduring value. And this is the great lacuna in the sudden explosion of interest in Indian contemporary art. There has been—at least thus far—virtually no institutional development, which is a necessary condition to not only sustain commercial value, but also to build upon the latent (and, in some circles, already triggered) aesthetic sensibility in the country. The good news, as I said before, is that more and more people are talking about it. And things will really start to happen when the lucky (or smart or terrified) owners of highly-priced art understand that the only way Raza or Tyeb or Husain that they bought years ago is going to climb from a million dollars towards the 10- or 20-million level is if individual demand is supported by institutional buying. In other words, people who own potential classic paintings, who love the work they own, and who have been pushed out of the buying market by the huge price rise, should—indeed, will—invest in building institutions to develop the skills and sensitivities of hundreds of thousands—no, this is India, millions—of budding art aficionados. The circumstances of India’s explosive growth have opened the doors. It is now up to us to build on it. Let a hundred—oh, OK, let’s start with a dozen—museums (and art schools and art appreciation classes and books and lectures on aesthetics) bloom.

The metro-centric nature of the Indian contemporary art scenario may soon be changing. Art is now being lapped up by affluent small-towners and smaller city buyers across various regions in India. This trend, which has been picking up for the past 3-4 years, is becoming more frequent now. “Earlier, it used to be only jewellery, furniture, carpets or cut-glass. Now, the small-town rich have become interested in art and are going out of their way to possess paintings. Of course, more than the investment angle, they feel art in the interiors of their homes enhances their status. The approach to art with an investor’s eye still seems to be largely limited to the metros,” art market sources told ET. Hence, as things stand, there seems to be a sudden surge of art buying among the wealthier populace of relatively less prominent locales. These include places like Shimla, Ludhiana, Yamunanagar, Panipat, Dehra Dun, Nainital, Kanpur and Bareilli.
There are also centres like Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, Pune, Lucknow, Gurgaon, Jaipur and Hyderabad. “Art buying has gained quite a bit of momentum in Gurgaon, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Ludhiana. These places also have art galleries which are not present in most of the lesser-known centres,” sources said. “Galleries, for instance, had earlier closed down in Ahmedabad. Now, they are vying with Delhi and Mumbai. Gurgaon and Jaipur also have quite a few galleries. Even Ludhiana, which boasts tremendous money power, is seeing art galleries,” the sources added. The genre of art that is being bought in small towns revolves around figurative works which are “good to look at”. Abstract works are not making their way into this buyers’ category. Besides, the buying is restricted to a price range of Rs 25,000 to Rs 1.5 lakh.
People could be buying signed prints of top artists, which are more affordable. These may include names like Raja Ravi Verma, Amrita Sher Gil, MF Husain, Anjolie Ela Menon or B Prabha, sources said. At the same time, they have also acquired canvases of Satish Gujral, Sanjay Bhattacharya, Anjanna Kuthiala and Prithvi Soni. “The buying in small towns could gradually turn to more expensive art, with buyers focusing more on the investment potential of a particular painting. This can happen with buyers becoming more exposed to art columns in the media. Information about art is still to penetrate in a big way into the less well-known centres,” sources said. They estimated the smaller towns to be generating yearly art purchases of Rs 5-10 crore or upwards of that at the moment, with buying in this sphere rising by 25per cent annually.

Ashok Nag

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