The tags ‘investor’ and ‘collector’ carry too much baggage — for most, it’s best to settle for ‘art-lover’.
So, you bought a couple of paintings this year — say, a drawing by Ganesh Pyne, and a canvas by Akbar Padamsee. These are good buys, show a keen eye, and are serious enough to warrant you an invitation to gallery previews. In addition, you probably own enough other art, such as Rameshwar Broota, or Manu Parekh or Jaideep Mehrotra, or even a painting or two by M F Husain and Krishen Khanna. Does that make you a collector or even perhaps an investor?
Neither, actually. This column has lamented the amateur tendency on people’s part to assume to be one or the other on the basis of ownership of art meant for display at home. Yet, buying art for most people is an exercise in aesthetics, no more or less important than choosing the carpets or furnishings or lights for your home. It can result in discussions on the merits of the artist, or artwork, but it does not make you a collector, leave alone an investor.
To tackle the latter first, investors in art are serious, professional players who have the ability to influence markets with what they buy or sell. At an international level, Charles Saatchi is one such who has made or wrecked the reputations of artists including several Indian contemporaries. In India, we see corporate investment in art at two levels. In the first, companies buy art simply as a matter of course — when they build a new office, for instance, but in which the company itself has little or no interest. It is for this reason that when companies sell or demolish a building, no one bothers with or prices the artwork, instances of which exist in both the private and public sector. This apathy is on account of people’s lack of interest in art, as a result of which some fantastic (and expensive) art has been trashed, or landed up in the hands of dealers at rockbottom prices (to be sold later at extortionate values).
On the other hand are investor-collectors such as the Grindlays and Deutsche banks, for instance, or the Tata group (and particularly Taj Hotels), or HCL, who have made art a part of their portfolio, not for selling but as an essential part of their corporate culture (that it can be turned into a liquid asset is just a bonus). It is rare when a company such as Bennett, Coleman & Co rocks the market by selling/auctioning the occasional work for well thought out dividends. When its Tyeb Mehta triptych became the first work of modern art to cross the million dollar mark, the news for most part was confined to the success of that particular painting. But what it did was to push up the benchmark for Tyeb Mehta as well as other modernists, thereby impacting their valuations in the Bennett, Coleman group (as well as in other collections).
This ability to influence markets has been rarely tested so far, and is confined to those few which have the benefit of size that is huge enough to benefit from a secondary sale of even a single work. And it is this modus operandus that art galleries sometimes employ to create an artificial scarcity around an artist’s works. It is for this reason that quality works even by such prolific artists as Husain and Manjit Bawa are becoming increasingly difficult to find. Expect their prices to rocket further in the months to come.
More From This Section
As for collectors, their primary interest might not be to buy or stay invested for financial gain but they still have the ability to influence markets. Collectors don’t buy randomly, at least once they have been around for a few years, so their passion to fill in gaps in whatever they hoard – whether a particular artist, or group, or medium, or period – can take the buying price up to a peak because a collector is willing to pay the price for his hobby. This, in turn, affects prices in general.
There are almost as few collectors in India as there are investors, but the good news is that there are a lot of art-lovers, and that increasing tribe will bankroll the growth of the art industry in the new decade — with or without the help of their more evolved brethren.
These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which the writer is associated.
