Artificial Pricing

AS DETAILS BEGAN TO TRICKLE OUT from Christie’s’ first art auction in India, held at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai in December last year, both the international and domestic media sat up and took notice. The auction had fetched a total of Rs 96.6 crore ($15.7 million), a figure that doubled pre-sale estimates. Tyeb Mehta’s Mahishasura sold for approximately Rs 19.8 crore ($3.2 million). Most dramatically, an unnamed 1983 work by the late Vasudeo S Gaitonde fetched an unheard-of Rs 23.7 crore ($3.85 million), now the highest price for any piece of Indian artwork ever sold. For days, the sales figures were the toast of the art world. Some predicted—as they do now and again—that India’s art market was finally coming into flower. Many speculated that the country’s millionaires were now ready to buy into the global art market, just as rich buyers in China and the Middle East had done in recent years.

The Christie’s auction capped a glorious year for the Indian modernists. Critics consider Gaitonde India’s foremost abstract artist, and the one who, more than any of his talented confrères in the Bombay Progressive Artists Group, stood equal to the best international artists of his generation. In accordance with this reputation, in June 2013, the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York announced that it would produce an exhibition of Gaitonde’s work in 2014. That same month, a Gaitonde work called Painting No. 1 sold for $1.1 million at the Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art sale in London. Other modernists also enjoyed significant attention. Earlier in the year, the Guggenheim had produced a Zarina Hashmi retrospective—its first of an Indian artist—while the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi held one of Nasreen Mohamedi.

But besides this spurt of interest in Indian modernism, 2013 continued a long lull in the Indian art market, particularly affecting emerging and mid-career artists. Major exhibition openings saw fewer visitors. Three galleries shut down in Lado Sarai, one of Delhi’s gallery hubs. So as promising as the record-breaking Christie’s transactions appear, they raise many questions about how art is currently valued, both in the art market and in the closely related but emphatically dissimilar art auction market.

There has always been a disjuncture between these two spheres. Gallerists typically regard auction houses as competitors, responsible for creating a secondary market that diverts huge sums from the gallery system. In India, for example, Saffronart, the country’s largest auction house, has been at loggerheads with galleries since it began to hold no-reserve auctions—in which the auctioneer does not set a minimum sale price—in 2012. Many believe such auctions have accelerated the depreciation of contemporary Indian art, which have been falling since the market peaked in 2006. For example, at Saffronart’s Absolute Auction in November 2013, a work by Mithu Sen, the 2010 winner of the prestigious Skoda Prize for Indian artists under the age of 45, sold for just Rs 25,000 ($400); the piece was previously valued by the auction house at Rs 90,000–1,20,000 ($1,450–1,950).

But over the last couple of years, the interests of galleries and auction houses have begun, in some ways, to converge, and the work of the modernists has played a key role in this trend. As the shadow of the economic slowdown lengthened over the art market, the mood grew bearish, and sellers’ focus shifted from emerging and contemporary artists to the modernist masters, whose established pedigree made their works reliable investments. These mid-20th-century artists, many of them dazzlingly abstract, even gained favour over icons like Amrita Sher-Gil and Rabindranath Tagore, whose works fall under the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act (1972), which forbids their export and so bars their sale on the lucrative international market.

Collaborations between galleries and art auction houses may be the perfect way to revive the Indian art industry. For decades, galleries such as the Vadehra in Delhi and the Chemould in Mumbai have held large stocks of high quality modernist paintings, most of which are yet to peak in their financial worth. Of late, many of these galleries, even as they actively support contemporary artists like Jitish Kallat and LN Tallur, have been surviving financially by cashing in on old masters such as Jamini Roy and modernists such as MF Husain, Tyeb Mehta and SH Raza. For instance, works from the personal collection of Gallery Chemould’s Kekoo and Khorshed Gandhy, most of them by modernists, fetched over $4 million at Christie’s’ December auction, a sum that the Chemould would have struggled to raise on its own. In galleries, paintings tend to accrue value over time; in the volatile, competitive atmosphere of the auction, prices sometimes double overnight.

But the Christie’s auction saw pieces appreciate at even greater rates. Siddhartha Tagore, the director of Delhi’s Art Bull auction house and editor of Art&Deal magazine, told me that before the Christie’s auction Gaitonde canvases on the market were priced between Rs 8 and Rs 10 crore. The leap in value to Rs 23 crore for one of Gaitonde’s canvases was astonishing, and there seem to be no clear reasons for it.

The sale occurred at a time when most art auction houses in India were struggling. At auction houses like Art Bull and Mumbai’s Asta Guru, activity slowed to a minimum in 2013, and Saffronart recorded no spectacular buying. Nor are there any clues in the Gaitonde painting’s provenance. Typically, sale records are set by works already considered iconic (such as Edvard Munch’s The Scream, which fetched a then-record-shattering $120 million at Sotheby’s in New York in 2012). In the case of the Gaitonde canvas, however, after Christie’s’ Mumbai auction, critics and reporters struggled to describe it—some just called it a “mustard-hued abstract oil”. Precise details about the painting were hard to find even on the website of Christie’s, an establishment with more interest than most in promoting it. Gaitonde resisted naming his paintings since he considered the practice too prescriptive, but the fact that this particular work never earned any unique moniker even from critics suggests there is little that separates it even from other Gaitonde canvases on the market.

Christie’s’ long-term agenda within India, as it has suggested in press statements, is to persuade Indians to invest in Western, not Indian, art. Super wealthy Indian customers remain attractive to Western auction houses in spite of recent setbacks to the Indian economy. Those auction houses often optimistically compare India to China—where Christie’s and Sotheby’s both held their first auctions last year—but doing so is premature. The highest price paid so far by a Chinese buyer for a contemporary work is the $28.2 million that secured Picasso’s Claude et Paloma at a New York auction in November 2013. In comparison, the highest auction purchase by an Indian is the $3.5 million, including the buyer’s premium, paid by the collector Kiran Nadar at the 2010 Chris London auction, where she bought Saurashtra, a massive 79-inch-by-79-inch acrylic work by SH Raza.

The truth is that the culture of spending money on art is not universal, and must be nurtured over time if it is to become common practice in any society. During the early 21st century’s global economic miracle, the Chinese state spent lavishly on art education systems, public museums and support for young artists, while the Indian government and art establishment did little to improve infrastructure or build public interest.

Not all is gloom. The National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi put on a mid-career retrospective of Atul Dodiya in December last year (in collaboration with the Vadehra Gallery and featuring works loaned from Gallery Chemould), and another of Subodh Gupta last month, suggesting that the Indian art establishment is finally recognising a new generation of masters. Such grand retrospectives—which often tour widely and generate larger audiences for an artist’s work—bestow significant cultural capital upon the artists, which can then translate into financial capital: last year, in the wake of the Guggenheim’s Zarina Hashmi retrospective, prices of her works rose significantly. In the next two years, we will certainly witness changes in where the market parks its money. But this will not fundamentally alter the fact that the Christie’s auction was something of an aberration, and that it remains difficult to foresee any boom in the Indian art market in the near future.