It is important to realise that art becomes investment only when people become conscious of the fact that not all objects will rise in value over time. So not all artifacts, however aesthetically pleasing, will become investments. Only those will that have a value and that value can reasonably be expected to rise over time can qualify to becoming investments. So there are aesthetic activities that will remain out of the range of what we call art investment.
Installations, by and large, are not investments, though artists like Vivan Sundaram have been able to produce installations whose component parts are not consumed immediately. So they can be sold and become investment over time.
Many sorts of objects can become investments but not every sort. The object must be recognised as something whose value will increase in future. This brings us to the point of what quality the object has that is likely to give it that in the future?
Contemporary art has its own qualities that make it worth investing in. So, we must look at what is intrinsic to contemporary art objects that makes them appreciate in value much faster than antiques.
The first thing is that contemporary art objects appreciate faster in value than antiques as their relevance is recognised only after some time, so they are relatively cheap to buy and their natural appreciation has a faster rate than objects that have already reached a price close to their intrinsic worth. These objects constitute the blue chip investments in Indian contemporary art. However, even these blue chip investments, while not being traded as bargains, are often so far below their actual worth in global terms that they still give us excellent returns. But when we deal with the question of investment in art in general, specific conditions should not distort our analysis.
From a strict perspective, contemporary artists are of three sorts: the young and unknown; the middle range; and the established artists. The investment prospects of all three are different. From the top down, the safest investment are the established artists. They have a history. They already are investment. The risk in dealing in their works is minimal. That is why most investors begin their investment in this category. In Indian contemporary art, this group consists of the initiators of the break from colonial art, like Rabindranath, Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore; Jamini Roy, Amrita Sher-Gil, Sailoz Mookherjea, Nandalal Bose, Ram Kinkar Baij and Benode Bihari Mukherjee.
Then there are those who represent the radicals of post-Independence India, the most important among them being FN Souza, VS Gaitonde, MF Husain and SH Raza. The same age group from Bengal is represented by artists like Paritosh Sen and Ganesh Haloi, as well as KCS Panicker from the South. Not all of them are equally highly priced. But the potential is there in all of them. None of them is a risk.
Then there is the middle range of artists. Some, like Ganesh Pyne, Anjolie Ela Menon, Akbar Padamsee and Kumar are already in the top bracket. Then there are others, like Krishen Khanna, Vivan Sundaram, Arpana Caur, Arpita Singh, Manu Parekh, Sunil Das, Shail Choyal, PN Choyal, Beohar, Ram Manohar Sinha, A Ramachandran and Manjit Bawa, who have made breaks from tradition of their own, who represent more of a risk than the first, but also represent greater possibilities as they have come a long way and still have a long enough journey ahead of them. Investors can buy their works with little or no hesitation.
Finally, we have the young artists. Here too, the risks are greater, but already a number of them have an all-India standing. These include Chittrovanu Majumdar, Apoorva Desai, Akmal Husain, Debabrata De, Paresh Maity, Atul Sinha, Swapan Bhandari, Sukhvinder Singh, Chintan Upadhyay, Natraj Sharma, Subodh Gupta, Rahul Arya, Bhagwan Chavan, GR Iranna, Sheila Mukhijani, Akash Choyal, and Manisha Parekh, to name only a few. But a number of them will have to steer clear of Euro-American gimmickry to be of relevance to our future. Then they will be worth investing in.
Indian contemporary art has already got a fairly stable structure of what constitutes good investment. It is art that represents a break from colonial academic art. It draws on influences from our folk art, from the art of Japan and China, from tribal art of different parts of the world and from the radical art that emerged in Europe after World War I. It highlights those artists who have made this break total, are not overwhelmed by these influences and express themselves in the conditions of their times with self-confidence and originality.
The success of our contemporary art all the world has given our artists added confidence today. The buyer need not be worried as long as the works he or she buys are in conformity with the qualities outlined above.