Feeding Frenzy

“Auctions are like stripteases: They rely on people being enticed by what's just out of reach.” - Jerry Saltz, art critic, Village Voice

Uma Nair

Art is about life, the art market is about money and a new breed of cash rich collectors with deep pockets are playing the tune. Just before he left for Basel Art Fair, India's hottest installation artist Subodh Gupta in an exclusive interview to www.artconcerns.com said: “Auction prices, as far as an artist is concerned, are unrealistic. I sold those two works ( to Christies Hong Kong) for Rs 8 lakhs. I don't think as an artist I want that to happen to my art. I want to, in the future, deal with a gallery that will agree to put an embargo on selling my work for the next 7 years. I would like my work to be bought because a collector likes it and wants to possess it, not because it will be sold at the next auction. Isn’t collecting about passion and appreciating value? It is not about buying today and selling tomorrow!”

`Suddenly the hype, the hubris and the money that has swamped the art scene has the art-world buzz swirling around the concept of `who next?'

A pushy haute bourgeoisie, brandishing money and buying names have brought in the queues. `Crazy prices, new collectors, new money and the speculative bubble,' says an artist. `Indians have been smitten by the collecting bug'.

Has art become a commodity? An economist calls it "economics-ism" and "bottom-line aesthetics,", when art becomes a commodity.

Last year in an interview to me Tyeb Mehta said: `The art-created is based on personal intuition, not art-marketeering, if artists are beguiled by the promise of financial reward, the creation will become production.' Obviously in that scenario now artwork possesses a whiff of spectacle, market calculation and consciousness of its own position relative to the spectrum of stylistic options available to artists.
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Delhi's most celebrated collector says: `Today's buyers are the opposite: They're affluent but detached and they tend to buy only in public, acquire impulsively, and usually buy only because they want to show the world. I think vanity becomes the most vital quality why else would Masanari Fukuoka buy Atul Dodiya for Rs 85 lakhs at Sotheby's instead of buying it at Bodhi Art Delhi Rs.18 lakhs?'

The prototype of collectors has also changed. The stereotype of the traditional grey haired collector is out But dealers in mid-century modernism are just the opposite: young, hip and earnest.

Young collectors however collect as if collecting is a sport, it has to be added to a collection, they do no collect with the same ingenious single-mindedness that collectors like Rene Hartman (Mathys) and Vikram Lal (Eicher) brought to ferreting out great masterpieces in early years. `How can a collector buy a work without looking at it?”, asks young Rajnish Caur, who has a show in Singapore.

Rene Hartman the abstract collector stood in front of a Manish Pushkale at the home of Renu Modi and said: I think a collector collects quietly, he doesn't shout it out to the world, collecting is one of the most intense personal pastimes, it embraces joy and fury, pride and regret, hilarity and fear, all within its ken, and cannot be as forcefully expressed in any other medium. But when art becomes fashionable artists become prostitutes because they stop creating they produce.'

`The art world is so huge, interrelated and dispersed that it will be more like a tornado than a tidal wave, then good art will get lost, 'warned Hartman.

Collecting is about money, marketability and instant gratification. In fact, auctions are altars of the disconnected; between the inner life of art and the outer life of consumption, places where artists are cut off from their art.

A top American dealer, at Basel, told me, "If you make the business transparent it would collapse overnight. I have to have the option to lie to collectors about what's available or quote them prices 10 times what other people paid. Entire careers are built upon fabrications, like about which shows sold out and at what prices".

Obviously the neo-rich have an amnesiac gusto about their impulses that are driven only by signatures. The art mart has collectors and buyers, and the latter are just part of the feeding frenzy.

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