What makes collecting and creating art exciting?

In an insightful column published a few months ago, The Mint writer Shoba Narayan mentioned of various fabulous facets that make the process of creating and collecting such an exciting process. Here are some of the interesting points that she made in her essay:

• Art isn’t a brand, but today’s art world has started treating it as such. Yet, there is a fundamental discomfort about this collision of the artistic and commercial worlds. This is the reason she would even pose the query: Is Anupam Poddar for real or is he is a fake?
  
  
• Had Poddar been a Mittal, you’d expect him to buy a portfolio or company that will triple in value; you’d expect him to have only commercial interests at heart. Well, art is different. Underneath all the crap and the hype, underneath the publicity machines and the gallery openings, underneath the rigged auctions and the rabid collectors, art is pure, noble even.
  
  
• It is the human species’ most ancient and necessary impulse. Underneath all the crap and the hype, underneath the publicity machines and the gallery openings, underneath the rigged auctions and the rabid collectors, art is pure, noble even.
  
  
• It is the human species’ most ancient and necessary impulse. Witness the Ajanta and Ellora cave paintings or the pre-Columbian sculptures. Hordes of cave people beautifying their dwellings for no other reason save to express themselves. Art springs from this romantic world view.
  
  
• As an artist, you may be associated with the most commercial galleries in the world; you may have morphed into a market-savvy sculptor who knows how to play the game and speak the jargon. But in the beginning, before the galleries and attention, you were a lone, struggling artist, trying to make visual sense of your world.
  
  
• This then is the fundamental tension of the current art world. We expect our artists to be ‘successful’ in commercial terms but we also want them to be ‘pure’ and free of commercial desires. We hold artists to a different standard than we hold, say, a private equity player. We hold the people associated with the art world to be somehow more real,” she rightly pointed out.