This well illustrates an eventful decade for Indian art that made curiously strange bedfellows with the bazaar, according to writer Anindita Ghose who in an elaborate essay in The Mint tracks tumultuous ten years of the new millennium in which sales figures apparently remained more in spotlight than artists or art commissions. This was a decade when the definition of contemporary Indian art took a marked about-turn.
- Between the year 2000 and ‘10, the auction circuit for Indian art and artists witnessed a boom – rallying from just around $5 million to a whopping $85 million.
- Saffronart, among India’s largest online auction houses was launched at the start of the new decade. It fast elbowed its way onto the auction scene alongside a few other prominent international market players such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s.
- Several aspects together underwrote the Indian art bazaar’s phenomenal growth: the rising economy, the new-found affluence of its financially empowered population, the global interest in the impressive ‘India story’ and so on. Art was the obvious newfangled frontier.
- Right at the vanguard of this wave of interest in Indian art were works by the veterans such as FN Souza and SH Raza. A painting by India’s celebrated modern artist, Tyeb Mehta, fetched $1.58 million at a Christie’s auction in 2005 in New York. Mahishasura was the first work of art in India that managed to breach the $1 million barrier. And since then, it has been broken on several occasions.
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