What does it take to create and sustain a market for art?

Mukti Khaire, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School and R. Daniel Wadhwani, an assistant professor at University of the Pacific, in a new research project have looked at the emergence of modern Indian art as a category in the international fine art market between 1995 and 2007.

The former, an Assistant Professor at HBS, has done her PhD (Management) from Columbia Business School after completing her Masters in Management from IIT, Mumbai. In appreciation of her academic excellence, she has received a special award from the Eugene Lang Center for Entrepreneurship. She has undertaken an in-depth study of the role of entrepreneurs and incumbent firms to construct a market for products comprised of subjective attributes as well as intangible value.

The study deals with the creation and consolidation of a market for modern and contemporary Indian art. Elaborating on its purpose, an accompanying paper states:

“Before 1995, fine art was produced in India sans little demand largely because it was considered provincial or decorative (in nature). To create a market for art, it was redefined as a new product category, i.e. modern Indian art, by a variety of participants including academics, artists, critics, and commercial auction houses. As Western museums and individual collectors started to take notice, prices for pieces rose, from a few thousand dollars to as high as millions of dollars, in some cases.”

This forms the background against which the two have contextualized their research work on a highly insightful study of genuine value construction as detailed and meticulously laid-out processes in a new dynamic market category. The observations of the HBS analyst is based on a premise that the Indian art market is a unique case to understand how entrepreneurs may well take advantage of fast-changing contexts and build on the actions of other players in the ecosystem to benefit from new market domains.