Securing Art Investments Is An Art By Itself

Investing is not merely a brute exercise or the gambler?s gambit. It is the activity that emerges out of an understanding and analysis of the present and the past it is developed out of and directed strategically into the future. This process applies to all investments, but it is particularly transparent where the art is concerned.

The reasons are obvious. Art is visual. It is ordered. It is the concrete evolution of a conscious direction. So it cannot but be political and ideological. As such, an analysis of what succeeds or fails as investment in Indian contemporary art in the broadest terms can extend its validity to other sorts of investment as well.

An oil-on-canvas titled ?Landscape? by FN Souza

The first thing that strikes one about the nature of good investment in our contemporary art is its connection with the struggle for independence. This in the field of art is reflected by the rejection of colonial academic impositions or even occidental hand-me-downs by towering figures like Jamini Roy, who turned away from chaste impressionism to becoming, as he said in his own words, a patua or traditional scroll painter.

This, of course, cannot be taken at face value. For right through his life, he abjured the flatness and lack of texture of scroll-painting and stuck faithfully to French cylindrical drawing which gives his work the originality that makes it stand out among his peers. This is interesting as one can draw parallels between artists like Jamini Roy and industrialists like Tata and Birla, who freed themselves of the tutelage of British capital, expressing a form of originality that made the shares of these companies survive when others were knocked out during the great recession of the 1930s.

So the first thing that matters in investment is a sense of self-confidence and even over-confidence, to free one?s investment from the colonial limitations imposed on them by metropolitan firms in the past and multinationals today.

The same thing is reflected in the attempts of artists like Rabindranath Tagore not only to counter both occidental or revivalist art, but also to forge independent alliances with individuals like the Bauhaus artists who were anathema to the purveyors of order by diktat, like Hitler. These works defeated those of hot-house collaborators of the British as they were rooted in the soil they were growing in.

This sense both of being rooted in one?s traditions and on-going movements on the one hand and having the capacity to converse on equal terms with anyone in the world, is reflected polemically in the writings of Souza who condemns both the hybrid Amrita Shergil and the Bengal School revivalists in rather extreme terms: but he does sound a clarion call for the emergence of a self-confident modernism in an India rid of colonialism. And what better than the influence of folk art of the peasantry to carry this agenda forward?

From this perspective, artists like FN Souza, SH Raza and MF Husain can be compared to shares of our public sector grates, which manage to remain bullish at the most bearish of times.

But beyond these what? It is easy to advise one to buy the Santiniketan greats or the artists of the Mumbai group. But it still does not solve our problem of picking and choosing works beyond their orbit, works that reflect the new conditions of our times. One of the most eminent among these, of course, is KG Subramanyan.

He has carried forward the works of the Santiniketan and Mumbai group by synthesising the traditions of Eastern and Western India.

Then there is a whole generation of radical artists like Vivan Sundaram, Arpana Caur, Sudhir Patwardhan, Arpita Singh and Natraj Sharma. This tradition filters across to Salima Hashmi in Pakistan and Shihabuddin and Shakila in Bangladesh.

This reflects the importance not only of the unity of India, but also of extending it beyond the borders of our country to neighbouring states like Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and the Maldives.

We are seeing it emerge, as the SAARC writers movement, but its isolation from the disruptive influence of the US interference in our region must be more completely accomplished to ensure the healthy growth of all forms of investment in our region.

From this perspective, we must resist the trends of revivalism; archaism and sectarianism while linking up our expression with modernism, universalism and radical changes. Without these, it will be difficult to secure it either in art or in any other field.