Mankind has a powerful instinct for levelling things. This is what preserves us as the human race. Otherwise, we may disintegrate into encapsulated elites and then die out altogether. In art as in life, we see that same trend of bubbles of oxygen rising up from the depths of ponds to the surface, giving life its sustainability.

On the Pedesta-1? 2002, an archival reproduction of Ved Nayar?s work

The art of the 21st century is no exception. Painting has not died out, nor sculpture–a thing of the past. Both are doing well enough. In fact, our Indian painters are scaling new heights if the sale of a Tyeb Mehta painting for no less than Rs 1.5 crore, and a recent panel by MF Husain for Rs 2 crore are anything to go by.

Both the artists belong to the Mumbai group. That does not surprise one as this group emerged as a radical critique of the modern India that had emerged under a capitalist landowner elite after crushing the democratic peasant movements in various parts of the country. It was an independent India, but one that could not fulfill the aspirations of everyone.

The artists of this group, notably Husain and Souza, were outspoken and experimental, taking on the agenda of both the art of Indian national movement and European modernism with aplomb. Picasso, that patron saint of 20th century radicals, who painted his indictment of Hitler?s fascism, Guernica, on May Day to highlight his political preferences, was their role-model in more ways than one.

That this trend still dominates our contemporary art and virtually controls the art market says a lot for the impact of the national movement and the planned project of modernisation that followed it. Its impact was so great that it has left no space for post-modernism and other glossy Euro-American trends to flourish in.

Our most serious artists of the younger generation that matured after independence, such as Vivan Sundaram, Arpita Singh, Apoorva Desai, Atul Sinha, Sovi Savarkar, TM Aziz, Ravi Kumar Kashi, Chintan Upadhyay, KS Radhakrishnan, Valsan Kolleri, Paritosh Sen, Paresh Maity, Somenath Maity, Debabrata De, GR Iranna, Nataraj Sharma, Subba Ghosh, Sidharth and Neeraj Goswami are very much in the modernist tradition. Those whose work ostensibly has a post-modern veneer, such as Anjolie Ela Menon, Arpana Caur, Neeraj Bakshi, Ghulam and Neelima Sheikh, Dharmendra Rathore, Gogi Saroj Pal and Ved Nayar, are actually very much part of the consciousness of the artist as an advanced guard blending the popular elements of folk and bazaar art with the sophisticated presentation of modernist art.

Such works are all good mainstream art and worth investing in. The more original the blend of our home-bred folk with universalist modernism, the better the investment.

Within this framework we have a number of abstract artists too, such as VS Gaitonde, SH Raza, Ganesh Haloi, Vineet Kumar, Sohan Quadri, Laxman Sreshta, Bhagwan Chavan, Vijendra Shah, C Douglas and A Balasubramaniam, to mention only a few.

Then there are artists like Bikash Bhattacharya, Sanjay Bhattacharya and Rahul Arya whose photo realist works command a high price. Others who work in our Mughal miniature format, such as Chotu Lal and Fawzia Siddiqui, also command good prices.

The main thing about our contemporary art market is its variety. The investor, however, must choose those artists who blend originality with excellence in execution. A rare visionary may well be able to get by with naively executed works but the average artist must exhibit skill to be considered worth investing in.

This year has been the year of the young. Artists such as Paresh Maity, Neeraj Goswami, Apoorva Desai, Dharmendra Rathore and TM Aziz have done well in Delhi; Atul Sinha with his highly original sculptures for use had a good sale in Bangalore; Debabrata De stormed London; while Atul Dodiya and Jitish Kallat rule the Mumbai market.

Most of these artists are very young indeed. And the fact that they have established themselves in the market reflects the fact that our contemporary art has a good future in the 21st century as well.

This future is reflected in the emergence of new galleries, with Delhi being the venue for 132 gallery spaces and Gurgaon for seven more. I believe the same thing is happening in Jaipur, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Banglore, Hyderabad and Chandigarh too.