Saturday, May 26, 2007

The Telegraph : When bubbles breathe the gallery art









Sunday, May 20, 2007
SOUMITRA DAS

Call it a bubble if you will but eastern India will soon have its first art auction house in Calcutta. What’s more, unlike the existing auction houses in Delhi and Mumbai, this sale room will have space of its own. Following the example of the upscale Christie’s and Sotheby’s, here the works of contemporary Indian artists will be sold instead of those by masters dead and gone.

Emami of cosmetics fame has tied up with Chisel — parent body of Aakriti Art Gallery of Hungerford Street — to launch this venture. The gallery will look after the auction house to be launched in four to five months, and in the first year Emami is initially making an outlay of Rs 30-50 crore.

Says Vikram Bachawat, director, Aakriti gallery: “Calcutta has a lot of scope because VAT (value-added tax) does not exist in Bengal. In every other state buyers have to pay 12.5 per cent VAT on every purchase of art.” Under a high court ruling, painting and sculpture are classified as handicraft which is exempted from VAT.

The auction house to be located in the Emami building (a glass tower designed by Mumbai-based architect Hafeez Contractor, though indistinguishable from other such transparent stacks) on EM Bypass will cover 14,000 sq ft (8,000 sq ft on the first floor and the rest on the ground floor). The space comprising two huge empty halls to be linked by a staircase is not ready yet, but going by the rate at which work is progressing it will be done soon. Sculpture and installations will mainly be displayed on the groundfloor. In the second stage of this project, a publishing house will be launched here.

Osian’s and the online Saffron are two of the better-known Indian art auction houses, but they don’t have space of their own. Saffron does not need any for it exists only in the cyberspace, although the income it generates is very, very real.

In Calcutta, art work will go under the hammer either in December or January 2008. Bachawat expects computer professionals, NRIs and people from big business houses to be his clients. They can keep an eye on transactions and even bid through the Internet.

EmamiChisel will push Bengal artists who are ignored in Mumbai and Delhi. “We will auction the works of mostly living artists,” says Bachawat. Besides employing experts, most of the authentication will be done by the artists themselves. So long as the sale room and the gallery can sustain themselves, the men behind it will be happy.

R.S. Agarwal, chairman of Emami says: “We are testing waters. After one or two years we can go into it in a big way. It all depends on the success of the project.” Although he has been, of late, acquiring a lot of art work, he is quite honest about his lack of knowledge. The paintings in his Southern Avenue flat are not really of the first water.

This auction house can be seen as a part of the current galleries galore phenomenon which the city is witnessing. Galleries are springing up unchecked, somewhat like fungus. Select galleries are advertising in slick (though not the really prestigious ones) foreign art magazines. But that, sadly, does not indicate that Indian contemporary art has arrived on the international scene. It is like Bollywood pretending it has a global presence.

The prices of paintings have reached such astronomical heights that they are beyond the reach of even young IT professionals, share market brokers and bankers, some of whom get seven-figure salaries. Of late they have been setting up private funds, each of them pooling in about Rs 25,000 to a lakh with which they buy a work of an artist considered hot.

Of course, before touching anything they keep a tab on market trends for which they regularly visit galleries. Since art has been appreciating beyond one’s wildest dreams, they resell these after a couple of months for a good profit. Indeed, this has little to do with love of art. In such an environment is an imminent bust inevitable?

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