Where are the collectors? I only read and hear about buyers, there are no collectors anymore. After all collectors collect silently for years, they have a passion about their choices. Today, there are so many buyers that the identity of a collector is getting blurred,” said Tyeb Mehta to this critic in 2006.
Month after month, the diverging evolution of the art market and the rest of the economy become more startling. The stock market wobbles and the art market thrives. The fuel that stokes its engine is the widening awareness that art supplies are dwindling fast. Within a given artist’s oeuvre, the chances of acquiring pictures with specific aspects particularly admired are often remote.
Soon after his work Idol Thief at Hong Kong sold for $14,40,000, Subodh Gupta ruminated over the madness for speculation and the newly fired zeal of dealers and buyers for buying an artist’s work and selling it even before a year or two lapses, in the rush for acquiring a profitable margin. “How does someone, who buys a work of art, just sell it so that he can get a better margin? This is atrocious! Where is the passion?” In today’s world of pomp and show, Tyeb’s and Subodh’s words ring true. And the new breed of buyers,who have deep pockets and are willing to splurge, seem to have taken over the art market.
Who then is the new collector? The one who reflects excessive embarrassment of riches or the display of ravenous intellectual and aesthetic hunger? The recent comparison of National Gallery of Modern Art’s (NGMA) collection with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in a city newspaper reeked of substandard artifice and sycophancy. Of course it also showed how naive and ill-informed the penmanship was.
While the lady in question, Kiran Nadar, has an acquiring eye; big is not necessarily beautiful nor is it the mark of a pedigree collector. An English collector of Indian contemporary art in London, who recently visited the KNMA, said, “You can have great art, costing millions of dollars but you must know how to showcase it. A museum cannot be a retail store, nor can it be an art gallery. A museum must have a spirit of connectivity balanced with an insight.”
The new breed of collectors puppy dog their way into media circles and get newspapers and magazines to carry unending columns on their greatness and their vast repertoire — how much they paid up, how they had to possess a Raza or a Gupta or a Kher, no matter what the price.
Five years ago, in an interview to The Asian Age, Tyeb Mehta said, “The art created by an artist is based on personal intuition, not art-marketeering. If artists are beguiled by the promise of a financial reward, the creation will become production.” In that scenario, now artwork possesses a whiff of spectacle, market calculation and consciousness of its own position, relative to the spectrum of stylistic options available to artists.
Today’s buyers are the opposite — they’re affluent but detached, they tend to buy only in public, acquire impulsively and usually buy only because they want to show the world. I think vanity becomes the most vital quality. Why else would fish baron Masanari Fukuoka buy an Atul Dodiya for `85 lakhs at Sotheby’s instead of buying it at Bodhi Art Delhi for `18 lakhs?
The prototype of collectors has also changed. The stereotype of the traditional grey-haired collector is out and dealers in mid-century modernism are just the opposite — young, hip, hot-headed and earnest about the art of boast.
The new breed of collectors collect as if collecting is a sport. They do not collect with the same ingenious single-mindedness that institutions like the NGMA brought to ferreting out great masterpieces in the early years. How can a collector buy a work without looking at it? The signature has become the potent force of the onslaught of buying.
Recently, this critic stood in front of a Manish Pushkale at the home of collector and gallery person Renu Modi and reflected on the characteristics of the serious collector, who collects quietly, without shouting it out to the world. At the concluded Art Stage Singapore, Abhishek and Devi Poddar’s presence echoed the truth that collecting is one of the most intense personal pastimes. It embraces joy, fury, pride, regret, hilarity and fear, all within its ken, and cannot be as forcefully expressed in any other medium. The Poddars also became the forerunners of the philosophy of philatelic vision in the art of collecting. But we belong to an age where collecting art has become a fashion and more of a residual sport.
Collecting is about money, marketability and instant gratification. In fact, auctions are altars to the disconnect between the inner life of art and the outer life of consumption, places where artists are cut off from their art. But at the end of day it is the auction that spotlights the artist.
A top American dealer at Basel said, “If you make the business transparent, it would collapse overnight. I have to have the option to lie to collectors about what’s available or quote them 10 times the price other people paid. Entire careers are built upon fabrications about which shows sold out and at what prices.”
Obviously, the noveau riche have amnesiacic gusto about their impulses that are driven only by signatures. The art mart has collectors and buyers, and the latter are just part of the feeding frenzy.
Art also fashions new values, where consumption has become a sacrament, with art playing the role of sacrificial lamb. A museum in a mall is an abomination, give me the Devi Foundation or the NGMA anyday. And the greatest gift to the museum, I think, is the constant belief that the future is going to be as interesting as the past if not more. A look at the NGMA’s past is enough to spell the history of Indian art. After all, a collection is more than a mere spectacle and far from the urban ugliness of a mall.