The recent exhibition organised by the Camlin Art Foundation at the Radisson Hotel was welcome for two reasons. First, it shows a healthy corporate interest in art as opposed to unthinking patronage. There were works of the top-ranking artists like MF Husain, Anjolie Ela Menon and Manjit Bawa; but most of them were light-weight.

The second for the rank of artists like Shobha Broota, with an excellent monochrome, Arpana Caur with a serene swimmer, Jatin Das with an abstract, Suddhasattwa Basu?s appealing water colour, Sanjay Bhattacharya?s yellow-tongued Kali, Anupam Sud?s ?Chitragupta?s Shame?; Abani Kant Dev?s ?Woman with Scorpio?; Neeraj ?Goswami?s Young Mystic?; Manisha Gera Baswani?s Treadmill and Veer Munshi?s Gandhi as a Gemini.

More than that, I notice that Camlin has picked on the work of a number of as yet unknown artists like Kiran Singh Chauhan and Manish Kumar of Delhi; Deepak Bhardwaj and Sanjay Kumar Rohdiya of Rajasthan; and Parul Modi, Neeta Chainani and Pawan Kumar Tiwary of UP. But there are many many more, like Yati Jaiswal of the Delhi College of Art who stands out in a crowd. So the corporates would do well to employ talent scouts like Hollywood film companies used to do.

A sculpture by Atul Sinha

Now that the “season” of exhibitions and sales is approaching, young artists ought to choose carefully which exhibitions they wish to give their best work to. As a curator, my experience is that artists love anything they have done; just as people tend to love their children come what may. So they hand their paintings round in serial order regardless of what company they are likely to be in. Sometimes a curator is able to get a choice; but with artists whose work sells, this is seldom so.

This is evident from the works I saw of big names at the Camlin show. This ought to be avoided if possible. In fact, when the work of a master pales before those of lesser-known artists, the art market as a whole suffers a loss of face. So the best artists, like the best in any field, ought to feel more responsible in general and take their responsibility more seriously than they do today.

The gallery owner too, must be prepared to invest in developing the art market by preventing its monopolisation by one or two major gallery owners. Also, galleries should avoid putting all their eggs in one basket by ?bonding? artists to themselves. Art develops best in a democratic situation and gallery owners must understand that and act accordingly.

The connoisseurs must not only be mere buyers of art, but also be always on the look out for new talent; and there is plenty around. They can choose a number of places to scout around in. Art colleges are the obvious place. Then there are art teachers in various schools, government and private. There are self-taught artists among whom talent, if it develops, takes a very original path. And finally, the powerful and varied treasure that is our tribal and folk art, a living expression that has been extinguished in much of Europe and the US and replaced by Kitsch.

Among today?s known artists, there are a number of original ones trained at art schools like Vadodara, Santiniketan, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Jaipur and Kolkata. Among them, the younger ones, like Vivan Sundaram, Chittrovanu Majumdar, Atul Sinha, Bhagwan Chawan, Paresh Maity, Sidharth, Debabrata De, Chintan and Hema Upadhyay are a few. Among the self-taught, we have Arpana Caur and Anil Revri. And among folk artists, people like Ganga Devi, Jangarh Singh Shyam, and a number of others have made a name in the world of art. So there is plenty to choose from.

However, patronage must be creative. For sometimes an artist, unable to take the accolades of fame, or worse, the greed of his or her promoter, may actually decay or commit suicide. This happens more often than we think. And tending the art market is much more difficult than tending a garden full of exotic plants.

Buyers and investors ought to be very careful not to promote bad or mediocre art simply because they were able to get it cheaply. This has a negative result in the long run and it should be avoided at all cost. Buyers and investors should follow the art market carefully, understand why the works of some artists rise in price and others do not, and ensure that their buying does not affect the market adversely.

In this way, one can develop a healthy market based on art that is meaningful in the artistic tradition of a country, perceptive in its vision of the future and original in expression. With this rule of thumb before them, they cannot fail.