Log on to art

The success of India’s first online art fair shows just how familiar Indians have become with buying art online.

For four years after he passed out of Delhi’s National Museum Institute, Paribartana Mohanty struggled to sell his paintings. The young artist from Orissa who works in oils finally took up an assignment with artist Ranbir Kaleka who was preparing for a show at Gallery Nature Morte. And while he assisted Kaleka for two years, he continued to paint. “One day,” says Mohanty, “Nature Morte’s director, Peter Nagy, said I should upload my works on Bestcollegeart.com.”

The online art gallery allowed him to post images of five of his best works on the condition that the price of none of these should exceed Rs 99,000. To Mohanty’s surprise, all five of his works were sold overnight. That was last year, months after the online gallery opened in September 2010. In the months since, Mohanty has sold five more paintings on the site — the value of his works has more than doubled, participated in a group show at Nature Morte, bagged the 2010 Emerging Artist Award of the Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art and is holding a solo show at Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery next year.

What the online gallery did was provide a direct interface between the young, emerging artist and the buyer. It also removed the financial and logistical burden an artist has to shoulder when organising a show in a bricks-and-mortar gallery. Saffronart, the online Indian art auction house and now art gallery, has been selling art online for 11 years now. With more and more people becoming comfortable with buying art online, however, a number of established brick and mortar galleries are also entering the virtual world to tap the immense reach and potential it offers.

India Art Collective, the country’s first online art fair, held November 19-26, was a result of this realisation. Over 40 galleries from across the country (including online ones) showcased over 900 artworks by more than 200 artists at this first-of-its-kind online art fair. Besides logins from Britain, the United States and Canada, enquiries poured in from Austria, the United Arab Emirates, Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore and China. “Within India, people from unexpected places like Gaya, Surat, Nagpur, Pune and Cuttack logged in,” says Sapna Kar, who organised the India Art Collective. Three of the people who visited the online show are on Forbes’s list of richest Indians, claims Kar. “Among those who bought artworks online are collectors from Sydney, Houston, Dubai and even Surat.”

“The highest-ever online bid on our website has been worth $2.2 million,” says Dinesh Vazirani, CEO and co-founder of Saffronart, which has developed a mobile bidding application where a buyer can view the catalogue and make a bid over a cellphone. This June, Saffronart sold an artwork for $1 million through the highest-ever mobile bid in the world.

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But what happens if the buyer is not satisfied with the art he has bought online? One of the biggest concerns of buyers is that what you see online might not be the same as what you get, in terms of finish and quality. “We have hardly ever encountered this problem; we also have a condition report which tells buyers the condition of the painting,” says Vazirani. He adds that once the work is sold, it cannot be returned.

Kapil Chopra, vice-president of Oberoi Hotels and the force behind Bestcollegeart.com, says he has encountered this problem a few times. “The buyer is free to return the work and get a refund,” he says. Besides individual collectors, institutional buyers such as hotels and real estate companies are also logging on to buy. Artists, meanwhile, can post their works for a maximum of 120 days, after which the work is removed if not sold. The artist can then post some other work. For every work sold, the online gallery keeps 33 per cent of the price — about the same as bricks-and-mortar galleries.

Another collector who bought an installation online misjudged its size and was saddled with a much larger piece of art than he had bargained for. “An online gallery alone doesn’t work,” says Nagy of Nature Morte. “You need a physical space where you can view the artwork. A person who is buying an artwork has probably seen some work by that artist somewhere, either at a show or at a friend’s place. The preliminary introduction has to be through the physical object.” Chopra, who calls his online gallery an incubation hotbed for emerging artists, agrees, to an extent. “Physical and online have to go together,” he says. “Visiting a gallery lets you enjoy the experience of physically viewing the artwork for which there is no substitute. Online offers you a wider reach.” So, besides the online gallery, he has also set up a bricks-and-mortar gallery on Sohna Road in Gurgaon near Delhi. Gallery Beyond in Mumbai, which started out with auctions, moved to shows and a virtual archive spanning 5,000 years of Indian art, too has “done the inevitable — established an art gallery of our own” in Mumbai’s art district of Kala Ghoda.

Vazirani, however, says that while physical space was needed a decade ago, people now are more at ease buying online. Saffronart, which sells works priced between Rs 30,000 and Rs 10 crore, has galleries in New York, London, Delhi and Mumbai.

While there is no figure to put a value to the online art market, Ashish Anand, director of Delhi Art Gallery, and Geetha Mehra, director of Mumbai-based Sakshi Art Gallery, both say it is getting bigger. “We put every exhibition that is on in the gallery on our website. And we do get queries and sell works,” says Mehra. She says the price of a painting does not prevent people from ordering online. If a painting is expensive, a buyer might want to see it before buying it online, says Anand, “but there are others who simply go ahead and buy them just like that”. Anand says that Delhi and Mumbai account for 95 per cent of the business; sales from the rest of the country account for just 5 per cent.

Even galleries like Vadehra, which does not have any works on sale on its website, have started putting works online for the duration of an exhibition. “People do email us after that,” says gallery director Parul Vadehra. “We get a mix of people who will buy after seeing the work online and those who will want to physically come and check it out,” she adds.

Nagy says photography is more successful when it comes to buying online “because what you see is what you get”. Without a bricks-and-mortar gallery, he says, an online gallery on its own is no better than a magazine. Hence the interesting blend — of physical galleries growing an online arm, and virtual galleries establishing roots in the real world.