Jamal Mecklai: Let a million museums bloom!

MARKET MANIAC

The good news, if it can be called that, about the recent wild and (to many) incomprehensible run-up in art prices, is that it has""finally""drawn attention to the woefully inadequate art infrastructure in the country.

Anyone who reads the trite and popular press, which by now includes ALL our major media players, has heard of Tyeb, Raza, and Souza""Husain, of course, has long been an independent icon. However, few people have actually seen paintings by them, and fewer still have seen high-quality reproductions in art magazines or books.

Thus, in the country at large, there is very little understanding""or, more importantly, "feel" ""of what these painters are about. In other words, almost nobody knows the value of Indian contemporary art, while everybody knows the price.

A classic situation created by runaway markets, aided and abetted by the explosive growth of the Indian economy and an evolving group of right-place-at-the-right-time hucksters.

So, where does it go from here?

Well, first off, to do a little huckstering myself, I have learned that while two living Indian contemporary artists""Tyeb and Raza""regularly (?) sell for more than a million dollars; there are only 30 or 35 global living artists who regularly break this limit. Thus, 6 per cent of the uppermost echelon (price-wise) of global contemporary art is Indian""by an interesting coincidence, this is more or less the same ratio of Indian companies (33) in the Fortune 500.

Thus, using this single""and, admittedly, arcane""metric, the Indian art market and the Indian equity market are about at par at the top end. (The second price tier artists, by the way, are not as populated with Indian names as the second tier of businesses; thus, for you punters out there, there's still an opportunity at the 100-200,000 dollar level.)

The more important issue, of course, is whether these prices are high in absolute terms and whether they reflect genuine""i.e. sustainable""value. Well, first off, value in art""I would, indeed, say in life""is totally subjective. I remember many years ago seeing a painting in New York by the then-celebrated Jeff Koons, which had an uncanny resemblance""in terms of how it affected me""to a painting I own by a local artist called Abbas Batliwala.

To me, they were near identical in value, but the Koons was over 100 times higher in price. To somebody else, there would doubtless have been a different equation.

Thus, I believe there is no objective measure of value. The closest I can get to finding an objective measure of value is time. If something""a work of art, or otherwise""remains in favour for decades or, better yet, centuries, it becomes a classic, with enduring value. Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, the Ramayan""these are all unarguably classics. In contemporary art, Picasso, Pollock, Warhol would be slightly less unarguably classics.

And, classics, of course, command what could be considered insanely high prices; I believe the highest price ever paid for an Andy Warhol was 17.5 million dollars""that's nearly Rs 80 crore, more than 10 times the Indian record.

Now, how are these prices sustained? Who pays such huge sums of money for a painting? Well, first of all, there are many very wealthy people in the world who simply love a work or love the idea of owning the highest priced Warhol in the world or both. But, more importantly, much of the action at these ridiculously sublime levels of price is the result of institutional buying.

Museums""public and private""are the key to underpinning the art market, and it is the distribution-side of museum activity""through which hundreds of thousands of non-wealthy citizens get access to and familiarity with "great" art""which ultimately enables an otherwise simply highly-priced painting to become a classic, to have enduring value.

And this is the great lacuna in the sudden explosion of interest in Indian contemporary art. There has been""at least thus far""virtually no institutional development, which is a necessary condition to not only sustain commercial value, but also to build upon the latent (and, in some circles, already triggered) aesthetic sensibility in the country. The good news, as I said before, is that more and more people are talking about it.

And things will really start to happen when the lucky (or smart or terrified) owners of highly-priced art understand that the only way Raza or Tyeb or Husain that they bought years ago is going to climb from a million dollars towards the 10- or 20-million level is if individual demand is supported by institutional buying.

In other words, people who own potential classic paintings, who love the work they own, and who have been pushed out of the buying market by the huge price rise, should""indeed, will""invest in building institutions to develop the skills and sensitivities of hundreds of thousands""no, this is India, millions""of budding art aficionados.

The circumstances of India's explosive growth have opened the doors. It is now up to us to build on it. Let a hundred""oh, OK, let's start with a dozen""museums (and art schools and art appreciation classes and books and lectures on aesthetics) bloom.