Will contemporary art be the next Infosys?

MARKET MANIAC

I believe that a key sideshow of the evolution of India "" from forever emerging to global leader "" will be that the prices of Indian contemporary art will rise, and rise sharply over the next decade(s).

While there will, of course, be a huge number of dogs (as with any other investment), the real winners will increase in value by easily 20-30 times over the next 10 or 15 years.

Already, several artists have enjoyed a sharp run-up in prices, but, more than this, it is the rapidly increasing quality of art infrastructure in India "" a necessary condition for the evolution of any market "" that drives my bullish forecast.

I have long felt that the prices of contemporary Indian art were far, far, too low. I remember one time, about five or six years ago, at a preview at Christie's in New York, I fell in love with a painting by Jeff Koons, a celebrated celebrity artist.

It reminded me "" not so much visually, but in essence "" of a painting I own by Abbas Batliwala, a little known Indian artist. These paintings evoked so much the same feeling that "" at some level "" they were indistinguishable. To me, they were the same art.

Except that the Jeff Koons piece was for $ 36,000 (as I remember, very cheap for him), while I had bought the Abbas Batliwala for Rs 18,000. While on the one hand this throws out an absolutely alarming exchange rate, I think the real lesson is that the value (or pricing) of art, like that of any other human enterprise, depends on the market "" on its existence, the liquidity, the number of buyers and sellers and, critically, the infrastructure supporting it.

Now, by infrastructure I don't mean simply auction showrooms or art galleries and museums, but also "" and this is crucial "" a framework for appreciation, authentication, price discovery, etc., without which value would not have any reference.

In India, while we have centuries' old traditions in the arts, in recent decades there has been virtually zero institutional support for art and culture.

As a result, the organisations we do have for providing education in aesthetics and art history and skills development in the visual and performing arts are poorly funded, and run by people who's idealism and purity have been dulled by decades of disappointment. Worse yet, there has been a horrifying "" and continuing "" loss of value of some of India's prized antiquities and historic art treasures.

While there are mavens who loudly wring their hands and beat their ample breasts about this, I believe that till now India's development has demanded different priorities "" primarily getting the poverty rate down, providing sanitation and basic healthcare and, of course, education and jobs.

Art and culture, like environment and even political activism, intrinsically highly valuable though they all are, were quite simply a lower priority.

The good news "" no, the wonderful news "" is that all this has changed. While India still has a long way to go in providing the basic minimum to all of our billion plus people, the fact remains that the surge in economic activity over these past years has been sufficient to not only drive economic growth and financial markets sharply higher, but also create a critical mass for change in some of these heretofore lower priority areas, art and culture being one of them.

For instance, curating, long a 'rich country' activity, has come into it's own. A couple of weeks ago, I went to the opening of a group show of contemporary art at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai. It was a grand celebration for one of the oldest galleries in Bombay and the show was amazing.

To be sure, I didn't like every piece, but there were a large number of wonderful artworks, ranging from paintings and photographs to installations and sculptures. More remarkably, the show worked together as a piece. The whole was more "" much more "" than the sum of the parts.

It had been a long time since I'd been to a show I'd enjoyed as much "" in fact, I couldn't remember ever having seen a show in India that was curated as skillfully. I believe that any museum in the world would have been proud to have it.

A few weeks before that, I had seen the Bhupen Khakkar retrospective (again at the NGMA in Mumbai) and, again, had been enormously impressed with the way the show was put together, with the way it had been curated. And just last week, I met an international group of photography curators that had chosen to have their annual event in India.

Granted that these are anecdotal "" single swallows, in a sense"" but I believe that by any measure there is a definitive shift in the cultural landscape from the laissez faire drift of the past decade(s) to an increasingly sharply focused drive forward.

And as this drive accelerates, just as the IT boom did in the 1990s, the art market will come into its own "" hence the title of this piece. Of course, before you take out your cheque book, you need to recognise that as in any market ""and more so in the case of an illiquid market where value is, to a considerable extent, subjective "" you need to study it before you jump in.

Art advisers rejoice.

jamal@mecklai.com