Distortion in art, distortion in prices?

TRENDS 2006-2007

ART: This year art became public property, and young investors found a new industry that would help their money grow.

This year, people found out that the things they drew in drawing class in school isn't really art, unless it's mutilated, deformed, distorted and served up as a parody of realistic art, or is that strange creature known as abstract art which you aren't supposed to understand anyway.

They also found out that artists are signing their paintings larger and larger, and that it isn't that nasty bit on the canvas that is worth anything, but the signature which is often more legible that the art. And this deep insight into art made a lot of people very rich indeed in 2006.

It was only a few years back that people spoke about art selling for a few-odd lakhs in hushed whispers. In 2006, it became everyday for a large number of artists to find themselves in the crore club "" Amrita Sher-Gil led the charge, but the expanding circle lost its intimacy as everyone from Tyeb Mehta, F N Souza, S H Raza and M F Husain to Ramkumar, Jogen Choudhary and J Swaminathan joined in these hallowed ranks.

And suddenly it was the turn of young artists to turn nouveau. As they basked in the media glory, you caught up with them exchanging notes on their Blackberrys and their penthouse studios; they compared frequent flier miles as they rushed from art camps on the Nile to auctions in London and New York.

In 2005 the Page 3 types for intelligent people had been authors; in 2006 it was artists (in 2007, by current reckoning, it will be sculptors). There was a good chance that some of the leading artists made more money than some of the leading artistes of cinema.

Indian gallerists not only conquered the domestic market (and laughed all the way to their banks) but also started invading the West. Galleries began to open up in Singapore and NYC and London.

The neighbourhood gallerist became as ubiquitous as the takeaway. Prices for artists hit bulls-eye on the Richter scale. The media began to associate the term "art" with "record price". International collectors took heed of the pickings in the Indian market, and a whole new genre of collectors was born.

The year gone also saw the gaining legitimacy of auctions and auction houses. Nina Pillai launched her auction space with a great deal of fanfare. An auction for NGO Khushii surpassed the wildest expectations because celebrities teamed up with artists, so each work got you two signatures for the price of one!

Existing auction houses, whether the homegrown Saffronart and Osian's, or international players such as Sotheby's, Christie's and Bonham's continued to be arbiters of "record" prices as well as India's "global artists".

The arc lights swung away from traditional collectors back home to youngsters with no history of collecting art at all. They bought a Paresh Maity as unselfconsciously as a Baker sideboard or a Louis Vuitton laptop case, concerned only by the brand equity it represented in their high net worth lives.

And many enterprising people turned the buzz in the art market into an entrepreneurial opportunity to launch art funds, and suddenly art funds were the flavour of the season (nothing else was returning money in quite the same quantity). Market analysts said it was okay to invest some (but not all) your savings in art equity.

Artists leapt across the great commercial divide to discuss investments instead of philosophy. Gallerists and collectors and media muttered about the astronomical prices, and how it was unsustainable, and the bubble would burst.

It didn't. And in 2007, more people will make more money from art, more records will be broken, and the Rs 1,000 crore art market will likely grow to a Rs 2,000 crore art market.