With art market set to gather mometum, now is the time to enhance your portfolio

“If you are invested in art, albeit only as a collector, experts now advise to both sell and purchase more if you wish to leverage the market. In essence’ Leverage your mistakes to create value’ are the words of wisdom from Kishore Singh in a recent Business Standard column .

It reads: “If that (advice) sounds paradoxical at a time while almost everyone has been advising caution and is telling you to lie low, there are sound enough reasons to use this opportunity for improving your collateral without losing any money.”

This is a golden chance to enhance the overall quality of your collection. You get to buy when valuations are low and art works are therefore affordable; you probably get the pick of the crop at that price point, the columnist observes.

Everyone is bound to make mistakes especially with one’s early buys, with or without the experts’ help. Chances are that you would have paid probably less than even the present low valuations (assuming no one tends to start by investing a crore of rupees and more likely a couple of lakhs on a painting), so you might not lose any money in the bargain.

Even if you do, it still isn’t such a bad deal because you rid yourself of something you recognize was a poor choice but you now have the liquidity to get something else (of better quality) in lieu of the resold works. According to experts, you need not replace an artist’s works with some other works by him or her. It’s better to diversify with a younger and lesser-valued artist/s.

If you have the money to spare, this is the time to buy irrespective of whether you’re a collector or not, or have some earlier works to dispose or not. The share market has been gradually on an upswing. And just as now is the time to invest in real estate, this is also likely the best ever time to invest in art, is the columnist’s pertinent piece of advice. With art market set to gather mometum, now is the time to enhance your portfolio!