When we see the auctions of Indian and South East Asian art mounted by Sotheby?s and Christie?s, just a day away from each other, in New York, we see two global strategies at work. Christie?s has concentrated on large works of bluechip art, with 14 works of MF Husain alone fetching no less than Rs 51,862,278 ($1,183,800). With a sale of over Rs 5 crore of a total of Rs 10 crore or so for contemporary art works, one can see a particular strategy at work.
The Christie?s are utilising MF Husain?s pre-eminent position to create the top of the pyramid and highlight it. To an extent, the strategy has worked. Not only did contemporary art account for 62.5% of all the sales, but the fact of concentration on Husain seems to have paid off as well as four of the works sold at a price above Rs 43.8 lakh ($100,000) and eight at above Rs 21.9 lakh ($50,000) and below Rs 43.8 lakh. So, from the sales angle, the pushing up of Husain as a star performer has helped.
The hype created by highlighting Husain has not only helped to push his prices up, but close associates of his like SH Raza sold three works above the Rs 43.8 lakh mark and Akbar Padamsee sold one at Rs 81.5 lakh.
Sotheby?s, however, used another approach of a broader base with a number of artists being highlighted together. While their results did suffer a little from the Christie?s sale of a day earlier, and the sales of contemporary art were only some 30% of the total sales, they also benefited from the magnet effect with a Husain work selling at Rs 63 lakh and a Souza landscape going at Rs 57.8 lakh.
Apart from these, another Souza landscape sold at Rs 26.3 lakh and a figurative at Rs 23.7 lakh. From this, it would appear that as far as the auctions are concerned, the pyramid approach is good for individual sales as it does push up the prices of some artists who form the apex and also raises those of artists closely associated with them.
A far more serious question, however, is whether this form of encouraging prices helps in the long run. It tends to create a hiatus between the prices a star artist sells at and those of the others. And it tends to stunt their development as market commodities. A singular commodity might work wonders in a sale; but its use as a long-term market strategy is questionable. This is evident from the prices works of Husain sold at in the Sotheby?s auction just one day after they peaked at the Christie?s auction.
It would appear that pyramid-making encourages the buyer to go beyond the price he or she is prepared to pay for a work at a one-time sale. But to sustain that momentum in day-to-day sales is not as easy. For that, a much more broad-based approach like that of Sotheby?s is a better strategy.
Already a number of new artists are visible on the horizon. We already have artists like Ram Kumar, Ganesh Pyne, VS Gaitonde, Jehangir Sabavala and Krishen Khanna putting up a tolerable presence; but now many other artists like Chittrovanu Mazumdar, Paritosh Sen, Neeraj Goswami, KG Subramanyan, Jogen Choudhury, Arpita Singh, Arpana Caur and Atul Dodiya are also making their mark on the market. The strategy evolved by Sotheby?s is preferable in helping this evolution.
I prefer the broad-based strategy, as it is likely to encourage our contemporary art as a whole to make its presence felt in the market to merely scoring one-time marks on the price-scale and leaving a lot of good art to fend for itself in the wings.
Our contemporary art has a healthy present and we should ensure a healthy future for it as well by projecting a broad cross-section of artists and not just individuals. So, from this perspective, the sales cheer up the market, but to sustain it, a deeper and more inclusive strategy is called for. The galleries are better equipped than auction houses to implement this strategy systematically.
From this perspective, the approach of evolving a pyramidal structure of the market for single day sales and a long-term approach to projecting a broad range of artists of different kinds but high quality as policy are not oppositional to each other. Rather, they are complementary with different institutions like the auction houses and galleries playing the roles best suited to them. So if we pay adequate attention to both these functions, the market ought to respond favourably. And that is what our contemporary art needs today.
