When, some months ago, a work “in pastel”, as some in India would disparagingly call it, sold for a heart-stopping — or adrenalin-inducing, take your pick — Rs 600 crore, most of us couldn’t stop marvelling that Edvard Munch’s The Scream commanded a price approximately half the value of the entire Indian art market. Where are the Indian buyers, we asked? Where the collectors? Are we without any interest in art?
While it’s true that Indians prefer gold — as a nation, Indians, at 98 per cent, have the highest individual ownership of jewellery, according to a Barclays report — it is somewhat apparent that wealth does have a relationship with the appreciation, if not always the purchase, of art. Certainly, the pink papers and business magazines tend to treat (and write about) art with a greater level of interest than the mainstream press, including, contrarily, the lifestyle media. But while the financial media appears more enthusiastic about art and its collectability, or investment worthiness — and at Rs 600 crore for a painting, you can hardly blame them — the snobbery, or selfishness, or dysfunctionality of the mainstream media remains inexplicable.
I can vouch for a huge and growing interest in art and related subjects within the financial community. Banks, biz schools, fisc institutions at least want to learn about the “business” of what makes art tick. “Civilians”, on the other hand, those who claim to be lifestyle consumers, seem not to mind being intellectual ignoramuses. It’s also interesting to see professionals who’re passionate about art. Lawyers seem to like boasting about their ownership of art (only the masters for them), while doctors of a certain seniority too seem to enjoy it (being rather more partial to contemporary art). Business families, entrepreneurs, industrialists start collecting art by the second generation, and claim collectorship by the third, as is evident in a milieu where a Kishore Biyani or G R Gopinath aren’t even casual buyers yet, while the Tatas, Birlas, Goenkas, even the Fortis Singhs lay store by art.
For all the association of wealth and successive generations, collecting — or even investing — in India is still personally driven, with one individual often being the decisive factor over an entire generation’s, or family’s, collecting. Nor is wealth always a guarantee of collecting. In recent months, I have had my share of contacting several collectors, and it is curious that it is not the recession that stopped them from buying art — to rest theories of the market being subject to the whims of the Sensex. Most big-ticket collectors took a sabbatical because they found the market overheating. While a few brought art — particularly contemporary art — at record prices, most collectors took a break because they wanted to spend what they thought reasonable sums rather than what the market was dictating at the time.
So, it hardly seems ironical that the collectors are coming back to the galleries even while the markets remain less than optimistic. What’s more, they’re coming with their cheque books, and they’re buying once again — bargaining somewhat hard, now that they can. While they are hedging their bets — and their interests — over a host of works, you can be sure they’re mindful of the current bargains. It’s a matter of time before the investors move back for the kill and clear up the market and raise prices again, but for now, it seems, the collectors are having their day out in the sun.
Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated
