If an art market survives, everyone, from the artist who earns a living from it, to the gallery who serves as a middle man and profits from it, to the buyer who is in effect the fuel for the fire, contributes to this process. The harmony with which these contributions grow and develop determine how the art market functions.
Of the three, it is obvious that the artist is the most important. If the work is technically unsound, if it lacks sensitivity or originality, even if it sells because of good marketing, it will lead to a foul-up in the market. For bad work has little or no resale value. And anyone who buys such work will not be able to sell it at a higher price. So the buyer will not easily buy another, much less become a collector.
The good artist, however, creates a collector with every work he sells. Indeed, India has a large number of artists like these. In the first phase, we had Rabindranath Tagore, Gaganendranath Tagore, Amrita Shergil and Jamini Roy. They not only tried to awaken people tocontemporary artistic expression, but also to communicate to them the beauty and fertility of our existing folk art, which people with eyes glued to colonial academism never looked at twice.
They, however, belonged to a class and an age when the market did not concern them. They neither needed the money nor gave much thought to it. Jamini Roy's one paisa apiece drawings, which were sold to mill-workers, are a case in point. But clearly, a serious art market cannot be expected to survive on such a basis. Under these conditions, art would be limited only to those who have money to live on from other means. In other words, they would basically qualify as amateurs. Secondly, such a narrow stratum could hardly sustain either the competitiveness, or the originality, called for by contemporary professionalism.
However, when needs expand beyond the given resources, the gaps are filled in by society in the process. The slightly aloof and remote artists were replaced around the 1950s by market-friendly ones such asM F Husain and F N Souza. This was also the age of involved gallery owners such as Ebrahim Alkazi, Kekoo Ghandi and Kali Pundole; of Ravi Jain and Virendra Kumar; of Shami Mendiratta and Daruwalla. Each of these in their own way, contributed to the evolution of professionalism in art. And what we call the art market today owes a great deal to them.
In this process, the emergence of the professional artist was one of the most important developments. And indeed, in M F Husain, we have one of the most professional of the breed. It is to his assiduous evolution of a market by giving buyers a bonus with works bought, paintings in lieu of air tickets, gimmicks to ensure press coverage and a large gathering that we owe our successful art market of today. And artists paid a heavy price for it. Even the attacks on Husain are not unrelated to his success in marketing contemporary art.
It is largely artists who succeed in marketing their art or who command some patronage that are treated as a threat. But it isevident that their detractors have failed because the emergence of an art market is necessary in today's conditions where everything sells. And those who serve a necessary purpose cannot be sidelined. Husain has been joined by a large number of artists today who understand the market and have used it to further the cause of artists.
Today, artists like Vivan Sundram, Shivaprasanna, Arpana Caur and the Cholamandalam group, have all contributed to creating environments where the artist is relatively free both of gallery owners and of buyers.
Arpana Gallery and another one run by Vasundhara Tewari give artists space to exhibit in--that is free of gallery owners, patrons and government institutions. Groups such as Khoj and Sahmat give artists a platform from which to exhibit. Cholamandalam in Chennai and Arts Acre in Calcutta have contributed considerably in developing our art. And other artists like Amarnath Sehgal have even created international foundations that project young Indian artists abroad.
Allthis has helped to free the artist--and our contemporary art--from the middleman and given it its backbone. Without this backbone, contemporary art could not have come into its own. So, the buyer today can safely go to a good artist's studio, not only to buy his or her work, but also for advice on what other works to buy. This is one of the healthiest trends in our contemporary art market.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
