Paying premium for provenance

BUSINESS CLASS

Two of the biggest sales of Indian contemporary art will take place in New York later this month. Sotheby's will auction 162 lots while Christie's will sell 129 lots.

The art market has changed dramatically over the last year or so and, for the first time, we are seeing several pictures approaching the $250,000 mark, something unthinkable just a few months ago.

Much like other markets, say, the stock market, commodities or real estate, the art market is also benefiting from unusually high liquidity both in India and abroad. The trend is coupled with an investment mania and there is a small but sure increase in the number of connoisseurs.

Though many traditional collectors initially complained about the visual assault they experienced with unusually high estimates on top quality lots, it seems quite certain that the sales will cruise through with many world records being made. There'd be a fair share of casualties too.

The general quality of works that has appeared at auctions over the last few years has been fairly abysmal. One of the reasons could be that the extremely busy but cash rich NRI collectors, who have, perhaps, become the biggest players in the auction arena today with little access to India, have fairly low benchmarks as far as quality is concerned.

In the online auctions, for instance, they are unable to view the works that they intend to buy. Add to that the fact that top quality works are getting harder to come by. But competent works with good provenance have tended to do exceptionally well in the past.

In these sales, though, there are some genuinely breathtaking works such as a Ram Kumar, a few 1950s Souzas, a late 1960s Raza and large oils by Tyeb Mehta and Arpita Singh, to name a few.

These are either works made by the artists in the prime of their careers or are the best examples of an artist's work. It will be interesting to see what premiums one can place on quality, rarity, provenance and good condition.

The chance of some of the high value lots not selling is remote but conceivable, and I personally think, that it's a good thing for the market as such steep rise in art prices is not sustainable and is simply unhealthy.

These could also turn out to be sales where the good gets separated from the average. That, too, is long overdue.

Paying top prices for top quality is now a worldwide phenomenon and India seems to be catching up. In July, the Chinese dealer Giuseppe Eskenazi paid a staggering $27 million for a 14th century Yuan dynasty blue and white vase.

Earlier this year, a Brancusi sculpture sold for 9 times its lower estimate at $27.4 million. A Canaletto sold for a world record $32.5 million last month and, to top it all, a US hedge fund manager paid art collector/dealer Charles Saatchi $12 million for a work by the "young" artist Damien Hearst.

Boy, is art expensive ? No. Money's cheap.