22nd Jun 2003

Happy Art: Good Investment In Our Time

Good art survives because it embodies a vision of the future. This is especially true of contemporary art. It is nothing if it is not forward-looking. That has little to do with what sells as art to hang on one's walls. The Indian hangers of the now dead Raj still sell the nostalgia of the colonial era, with blousy females and scenes from the epics. Those whose families have earned new wealth in the Republic still look for Kitsch and calendar art. Neither of these are good investment.

So it is evident that a sensitivity to good investment and taste does not go with a bank balance or credit card only. It needs more than that.

Good taste requires a knowledge of tradition but not slavery to it. It requires a sharp perception to assess the aesthetic qualities and skill of execution of a work. Even that is not enough. Originality of expression is a key component in distinguishing a good piece of decoration from an investment.

It is here that those who are merely moneyed fail. They, as much as anyone else, need to educate themselves into the intricacies of investing in art. In my view a number of galleries like the Art Today and Bowring's the auctioneers have had to close down not because of irritants like a court case or a CBI inquiry, but a much more serious failure to assess the future of art in our times.

Their major failure was that they continued to purvey an outdated colonial taste in art. And after a while what they were selling became boring as it was dowdy from the start anyway. A major thing to understand is that the contemporary art market is much more rewarding than that of antiquated bric-a-brac. But to understand it, one must look ahead and not backward.

What we look ahead to? We can look ahead to a world much more aware and confident of itself than ever before. Otherwise we would never have seen the kind of opposition we saw to the war led by the US and its band of predatory states against Iraq. Nor would we have seen the kind of support we saw for a formerly pro-American dictator, Saddam Hussain. Nor the resistance that has now taken a toll of some 50 US-armed personnel even after the war in Iraq was said to have been won.

We must also be aware of the fact that at present, this band of predatory states, while it does not have the capacity to reverse history, it does have the capacity to disturb its steady progress. In other words, we live in an age of insecurity. At such times, people are afraid to experiment too much. While this definitely reduces the options one has of making good investments, it also sets limits to the risks sane people dare to take with the funds they wish to invest.

If we look at the Saffronart education of May this year as a pointer to tastes, what do we see? Oils on canvas did better than drawings. Known artists did better than those whose role in our art history is hazy still. NS Bendre (at Rs 6,83,850); MF Husain (at Rs 15,04,000, Rs 11,86,750 and Rs 9,35,300); SH Raza (at Rs 19,03,500 and Rs 5,07,600); FN Souza (at Rs 10,10,500); Arpita Singh (at Rs 1,83,300); Rameswar Broota (at Rs 6,34,500) Rekha Rodwittiya (at Rs 1,17,500) and Sudhir Patwardhan (at Rs 57,575), all sold above the expected prices.

Three of these artists are perennials: Husain, Raza and Souza. Bendre again is one whose place in our art history is assured. Patwardhan, Singh and Rodwittiya are well-known as radical artists while Broota is a radical of another sort. Moreover, all these works are major ones and oils or acrylic on canvas. So we can conclude that artists who are known still command over-the-top prices as investment, that canvases do better generally than paper works or sculpture, that larger canvases do better as investment than smaller ones, and in our times, bold bright works fare better than dull ones - with the exception of Broota.

This is evident from the fact that Bendre's bright painting (an abstract built around a figurative form of a woman under a tree) sold above the expected price range, while his two other works that were dull, did not. The Husain work too, were of the "bold and beautiful," variety, while the Souza was one of his most luminous portraits and the Raza (Jaisalmer) is of a similar quality. The sales also show that figurative works fetch better prices than abstract ones. At times of uncertainty people seem to prefer clear pictures that are inspiring and not ambivalent ones. So the present is the time of "happy art" as people want to see a ray of hope in these times of despair.

It is interesting, however, that even while choosing happy works, they have chosen artists critical of our times, like Husain, who has only recently exhibited his "thief of Baghdad" series in a number of our cities. Clearly, the best investment even today is the art rooted in our struggle for independence with an original solution to visual presentation. This is a good rule of thumb for investors to stick to if they do not wish to share the fate of those purveying Kitsch or colonial art. Suneet Chopra

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