In these days of debates on procedures of value-addition to commodities and the process of doing so, many aspects of the question require spelling out. The first is that essentially all value-additions to a product is by working on it. With respect to a work of art, the essential value-addition clearly is the labour of the artist.
An artist?s skill and mastery over technique, and the capacity to compose an object out of raw materials is essential in the creation of a work of art. So the essential feature an investor ought to look for is technical excellence. That is why the work of Picasso, Souza or Jamini Roy sells for the price it does. Each of these artists showed exceptional command over technique and composition. Without these intrinsic qualities, the works of these artists would not sell for the prices they do.
Then, this value-addition over time translates itself into a body of work with a history. Such works have the added value of being socially significant and original in the context of a large body of work.
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Untitled gouache on paper by SH Raza |
Here too, the artist and the work he or she puts into an object determines the price. So the investor would do well to recognise that essentially the brand name of a work of art is that of the artist. It is that which determines the value of a work of art primarily.
How then does the investor increase this value through independent process of value-addition? There are a number of ways of doing this independently. First, the investor can develop the skill and mechanism of giving a work a name.
An investor can specialise in identifying works of well-known artists that are floating around in anonymity and such identification can immediately increase the price of an object considerably.
But such options at value-addition, while they do not come up every day, do happen often enough. The recent discovery of a number of landscapes of SH Raza by a Delhi gallery in the house of a fellow artist in Mumbai, is one such instance.
A number of these works, dating back to the late 1940s and the mid-1950s, were not even signed. But their provenance, the curating of the exhibition by Dr Geeti Sen who has been familiar with the works of Raza over a long period of time and a nod by the artist himself made it a good example of how a gallery can, and does, add value to a work of art.
There are other methods too. A gallery can ensure that the artists it is promoting become ?brand names? by producing literature on them.
For example, Vadhera gallery has produced a number of monographs on different artists, like Ram Kumar and others. The Kumar gallery produces monographs too of the works in its collection.
But the best and cheapest method of adding value to an artist?s work is to produce a catalogue. This helps to put the work of younger artists on the map. In the case of older artists, it can help to show a new stage of development.
And it can also be a way of presenting a gallery?s curatorial resources for special shows. But the point to remember is that such value is essentially the measure of an artist?s effort and creative qualities.
Now, to deal with some negative aspects of value-addition that is really exploitation in disguise. Recently, in the tea industry we have come across the phenomenon of auction prices going below the price of production without any decrease in consumer prices.
So the value-addition the wholesalers (generally big buyers who manipulate auctions) claim is really a plunder of the planters, workers and consumers.
A similar shift of value takes place where galleries manipulate prices by monopolising artists and selling their works through single outlets. This is not value-addition. This is exploitation of both the artist and the collector.
Galleries should avoid such practices as they have perfectly legitimate ways of making a profit by benefiting from the variation of price over time (by buying works early in an artists career and selling later when the artists becomes well-known) or variation in price between different centres. This profit reflects the creative input of the gallery and legitimately represents value-addition to a work of art.
Value-addition must reflect the process of the creation of value of any commodity. It must never take the form of the exploitation of the artist as in this way both the artists and the buyers suffer. As a result of such practices, the art market also gets distorted. Such practices must be avoided if the art market is to remain healthy.
