Overview of auction process from a domain leader

The leading auction house, Saffronart, is going to add more categories and products to its fold. In a detailed talk with Pradip Kumar Saha of The Mint, its COO Nish Bhutani made insightful observations about the art market, emerging trends in it, online auctions and users’ mindset. Here is a quick recap:

Buyers profile:

• The buyers could be successful entrepreneurs. That could range from people running huge corporations or running small but very successful businesses. There are certain business families and senior partners from private equity or law firms plus senior executives in large corporations. Roughly, 60% of the customers come from India. And around 80% of our overall buyers are of Indian origin. Hong Kong, Singapore, Middle East, the UK, Europe, those are the major countries.
  
  
• In India, there was a strong boom between 2004 and towards the end of 2008 when the industry, like most others, was hit by the financial crisis. Subsequently, there was a dramatic impact on the market. But the market has recovered quite well since then. It hasn’t recovered uniformly, it has done quite well for the modern artists, but for some of the younger contemporaries, well, they haven’t performed that well.
  
  
• The art market, in general, has performed differently in different parts of the world. For instance, in some countries, it has outperformed the equity markets over the last few years. Unfortunately, in case of India, they have lagged the equity markets post the financial crisis. But for the longer term, I think the prospects are great. And this is the time to start collecting.

Trends in Indian auction market

• One of the trends in the industry is that a lot more people are growing comfortable with buying in auctions, particularly in online auctions. In smaller auctions, with lower price ranges, and the new format of auctions in which there is no reserved price, more people are participating. The other thing that the art market needs over time is a broader customer
  base so that it is not reserved for the elite few and more and more people can participate.
  
  
• More Indians are starting to collect art that is not Indian. You know, in every culture, we see people first start collecting art that belongs to their cultures and, then, over time, they diversify to other cultures. For the Indian art market, that time has come.