Art funds might have suffered, but investors are still keen on returns from the art market
Given that it is at best subjective, it’s understandable that there is a little apprehension of how you arrive at the “right price” for art. This is more difficult than most investors, or even collectors, realise. Naturally, such prices are based on an artist’s body of work, identification with the artist’s style, the institutions that have collected the artist’s works and, importantly these days, international recognition. Even so, two things can still trip you up. The first, that prices for the same artist’s works can vary widely (based on quality, or on the importance of a series, but this takes a lot of viewing and reading to understand), and second, when a collector’s ego is matched only by a purse large enough to allow for bidding far in excess of estimated or even future value. A similar parallel might be drawn with real-estate where the perceived value of a neighbourhood is sometimes in excess of the actual value.
Still, some questions raised during the course of the discussion need to be talked about. For instance, one reads frequently of the highest price achieved by an artist, but do prices for an artist also fall? Though rarer, this has been known to happen (leaving aside fall in values on account of the recent economic recession). Mostly this is on account of unreasonable prices and valuations, such as when the market was scorching a trail and buyers couldn’t have enough of the established artists. When dealers moved in for short-term gains, they harmed those artists by inflating values at unsustainable levels. It did not reflect on the calibre of the artists, whose market values were otherwise stable and works desirable, but inflicted damage nonetheless.
A second reason for prices being held in check has to do with rumours of fakes. That there are fakes is hardly news — given the prices, no one should be surprised by that — but that some collectors prefer to keep buying work of dubious merit at a lower price rather than with provenance at a higher value, keeps that industry churning. This is one reason Jamini Roy’s paintings have never hit a phenomenal high despite his being considered a master, and this is a matter of national shame.
What happens when work varies greatly over the decades, does that impact prices? Of course, it does. Just as no two books by an author will have similar literary merit, so work by the same artist will differ, with some of it striking a stronger emotive chord among us. For instance, some of M F Husain’s work that is considered his best — Man and Zameen painted in the sixties, the Ramayan and Mahabharata series of the seventies, Between the Spider and the Lamp of the seventies and eighties — is unmatched by later paintings, and their value will remain far higher than even otherwise well acknowledged works such as his Mother Teresa series. And you thought he only painted horses!
Here, one must caution that it is collectors who sometimes cause damage by commissioning an artist to paint a familiar theme over and over again — Krishen Khanna faces this dilemma with his Bandwallahs even now. The familiarity of the work acts like a comforter, but it stops the artist from experimenting, and growing. Also, too many works on the same subject take away some of the mystery as they clone themselves across living rooms.
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But what about the issue of an artist producing too many works? How do they impact prices? There is little doubt that rarity is a virtue, as in the case of Tyeb Mehta. But F N Souza painted profusely, and there seems to be nothing stopping his works from gaining more than their fair share of value — proving yet again that it is quality alone that ensures an artist’s fiscal longevity.
These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which the writer is associated.