Today?s art market reflects a number of new tendencies. The best place to buy art directly is the artist?s studio. The advantage is that authenticity is assured and the middleman?s profit is cut out. But the disadvantage is that the range of good works available in studios is necessarily limited. Galleries are the best places for collectors to access a wider range of artists.
Of late, monopolistic tendencies are overtaking galleries. Being attached to a gallery an artist does not have to bother about sales. If the gallery concerned pays a retainer, it is a huge increase in the artist?s security.
The monopolised artist becomes dependent on the gallery. And it manages to get a special source of supply of an artist?s work without having to compete with others. This also helps the investor. First, access to a sufficient number of works is necessary to invest in. This is one of the major reasons Souza, Raza and Husain have crossed the Rs 1-crore mark. Rarity of a work or its special quality may have enormous value for the collector, but accessibility is the most important element when it comes to investment.
So the new art monopolists catering largely to investors will find room to develop as specialists. Also, as the base of our contemporary art market is still expanding at a considerable pace, the negative principles of monopolies will for some time remain merely a trend of specialisation for better competition, which is something that will not allow the investment market to be controlled by a few big names.
This process is evident from the catalogue of Saffronart?s online auction of May 10-11. A Husain Horse series oil on canvas priced at Rs 43-64.5 lakh (lot 4) compares favourably with the prices achieved by Subodh Gupta, Chittrovanu Mazumdar or Atul Dodiya. One can be sure that the negative principles of monopolies will neither affect range nor creativity. But for how long the process will survive depends on the capacity of the market to expand.
Investors can help to do this by dove-tailing 25% of their funds to stocking young artists with a consistent track record. This will allow development of big names of the future and contribute to long-term returns of a high order. As is evident from the Saffronart action, pen and ink drawings have a wide market. The inclusion of of Himmat Shah, Akbar Padamsee and B Vitthal is a welcome invitation in that direction. So we need not rely on the limited choice monopolists will restrict us to.
