The art market, like every other type of market, has three elements to it: the producer, the buyer and the middleman. The artist is the producer, the buyer may be a collector, an interior decorator, a corporate buyer for offices or hotels, and, of course, individuals who buy something good to look at. The pulls and pushes of the market vary with the strength each of these has at anytime. At the moment, our market is dominated by the artist. So the artist-buyer relation is crucial to understand the market today. It is true that the ultimate determinant is the buyer. If the buyer fails to respond, the best-laid plans of promotion and the best works will remain unsold. The most important element that motivates the buyer is the need to have a visual stimuli to think with. What sets apart the work of art from cinema, television and other visual media is the fact that it is not commercialised. Its individual character, and especially the irreverent and critical character of contemporary art allows it to free itself from the net of consumerism and allows the shoots of future directions of taste to emerge.

FN Souza: Head expected to sell at Rs 5-7.5 lakh on internet

And they do, with a vengeance. The artist Van Gogh sold only one work during his lifetime but today his works are among the highest priced in the world. For years, it was very difficult to sell works of Tyeb Mehta. Recently, he sold at no less than Rs 1.6 crore. These are not inexplicable events. They reflect how closely an artist is in tune with changing reality, his or her grasp of what will persevere among these changes, and the importance of a particular work or series in the evolution of changing tastes.

There are ups and downs. Extraneous factors enter into the price, like the cost of the material used or the historicity of the subject. But in the long run, the subject matter alone does not determine the price a work sells at. That is determined by the place the artist has in a particular art tradition, the originality of the work, the quality of its execution and its state of preservation.

Then some schools of tradition fetch better prices than others. The Santiniketan School and Mumbai Group are the most sought-after in our contemporary art. I have specifically mentioned the Santiniketan School as distinct from the Bengal School because these artists: Rabindranath Tagore, Gaganendranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Benode Behari Mookerjee and Ram Kinkar Baij, the leading artists among them, broke away from the British tutelage of Havell and Ababnindranath Tagore, his most faithful follower, and charted a path that was to become the main thoroughfare of contemporary Indian art. The Bengal School merely established links with the precolonial past that was destroyed by the British, but restricted themselves to revivalism. This does not mean that the Bengal School artists do not sell well. They do, but the rate of growth of the price of their works, discounting temporary ups and downs, is generally much lower than that of the Santiniketan masters.

Among the artists of the various post-independence groups like the ones in Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Delhi and Srinagar, the Mumbai group fares the best. The reason perhaps is that they represent a break from inward-looking nationalism as well as oppressive colonialism. They broke away from the colonial vision of the Raj being an offshoot of the Progressive Artists Group and then broke out of its limits to find common cause with the popular art of the consumerist age. MF Husain reflects its consumerist edge and Souza is progressive-critical edge. Between these two extremes, they have evolved a broad area of relevance. That is the basis of the success of artists like MF Husain, SH Raza, FN Souza, VS Gaitonde, HA Gade, KH Ara, Tyeb Mehta and Bakre.

Then there are the individual breaks from the past, like Jamini Roy, Amrita Shergil, Sailoz Mookerjea, KK Hebbar, KCS Panniker, Chitto Prasad, Nikhil Biswas, Jehangir Sabavala, and early Satish Gujral. Today, we still have such loners as Ganesh Pyne. To be a loner, of course, is more dangerous. He or she too, makes a break. Indeed, the break may well be far more radical than that of the groupies, but there is the danger that it may remain just a flash in the pan or a rose cutting that does not take. So one must be sure that the maverick one may be backing is not limited to a solo act. His or her work must feed a trend, however remotely, to be worth investing in. It is when we begin to think of this aspect that we can distinguish between Picasso and Dali, both world-level artists. The former has bred hundreds of artists in his image all over the world, the latter broods as a lonely colossus with a few equally lonely acolytes in the world. The investor ignores this aspect at his peril.

There are a number of auctions in the offing, like the Delhi auction of Bowring?s and the online auction of saffronart.com. There are works enough and trends enough to choose from. But the rule of thumb guide for the bidder is something like this: Choose the break from colonial art and reverential art. The best groupings that reflect this are the Santiniketan artists and the Mumbai group. And pick artists who have given birth to trends beyond themselves. You can?t be wrong with that.