Saturday, June 2, 2012

Indian art market: the road ahead

An Art Market Confidence Survey late last year stated that the confidence in the Modern market of India remained high, in spite of negative economic outlook. The overall Market Confidence Indicator was down by close to 30%, as the confidence in the country’s economy significantly dropped. In spite of this, experts remained positive about the Modern art market, with some confidence returning to the contemporary art market.

On the other hand, according to the Indian auction data analysis publicized a couple of months ago on basis of most recent sales by the key auction houses, the Modern & Contemporary art market experienced decline. The nascent Indian art market, still awestruck by the prices Tyeb Mehta, F N Souza, S H Raza, or Subodh Gupta command, is largely echoing the Western market (trend) in appreciating values for historic or rare works. However, there is a lot of scope for Indian masters as well as globally-recognized artists to grow, an opportunity that the country is probably missing out on owing to lack of infrastructure and the state support those like in China do.

Writer and art critic Kishore Singh explains, `to an extent, private entrepreneurship can be credited with building up exposure, prices and knowledge.’ While any hope of a recovery is premature yet, individual works have been drawing buyers at record-selling prices.

He adds, “This is perhaps because rare works entering the market to create liquidity for their owners are attracting those with wealth but no previous access to high-value masters. The trickle to buy quality works in developing countries could soon become the proverbial flood, but what lessons are there in it for India? After a roller-coaster ride, the art market in India now seems to be on stable ground, The Wall Street Journal news report by Margherita Stancati and Shefali Anand had observed.

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