The new art capital of big bucks

The size of the Indian art market just exploded. The biggest jamboree of the Indian art world returned this year to a larger foreign presence, boasting American billionaires sussing out Indian art for investment purposes, the chairman of Sotheby’s doing the rounds, and participating galleries taking larger spaces to show more artists, with thousands of artworks on display. As the figure of Rs 3,000 crore was loosely bandied around as probably the worth of the art on display, tax sleuths, it was rumoured, joined the queues among the collectorati at New Delhi’s India Art Fair, sniffing around amidst artists, gallerists, buyers, dealers, middlemen and anyone likely to gyp the state of its legitimate share of what promised to be substantial levy. They were not the only ones wanting to size up the scale of the Indian art business—something the fair’s organisers and art promoters have been keeping a keen eye on too, as the five-day fair winds down tonight among caseloads of champagne.

The business was not all at the fair grounds, of course. Collateral events around the city led to traffic blocks, visitors could be seen speeding from openings of huge shows on the sides to prize announcements, seminars, talks, walks, brunches and parties. International art fair organisers wanted to woo Indian presence at their events, while American, European and Chinese galleries upped their ante to chase the Indian buyer even aggressively. In the aisles,

visitors wanted to know why Subodh Gupta was being shown by Hauser and Wirth. Everyone, though, it seemed was talking about whether or not the businesses had meta-sized following a few weak years.

Last year, at the third edition of the India Art Summit (as it was formerly called), the frenzy had centred around a display of works by M F Husain, but the buzz this time has been about the smell of big money. Everyone was hustling for it but no one was sure who had the biggest slice of the pie—or even who had the pie. But it shifted the focus squarely on New Delhi as the art capital—something the city that still subscribes to the aesthetics of calendar art—had been claiming for years before it was legitimised by the India Art Fair.

A few weeks before the art fair opened, the Delhi season had been its usual busy, self-absorbed self. There had been fashion weeks and book launches, food festivals and charity promotions, the passing through with press conferences in their wake of international glitterati and desi stars, with flurries of invitations choking the mailboxes of the city’s A-listers while those who pout their way through the cocktail circuit were in demand for their ability to draw photographers. In between the wooing and vying, there was the wining. “I hope you’re coming to the retrospective,” promoters rang up “contacts”, hoping to distract them from the evening’s diversions offered by a party hosted by an automobile company and the opening of yet another restaurant.

“What’s the whisky you’re serving,” one “contact” wanted to know. Another was favourably inclined because the gallery did “good snacks”. Few bothered to ask the name of the artist who was being exhibited. In philistine, macho Delhi, admitting to an appreciation of art is tantamount to admitting weakness, which is why the capital’s art jamborees are akin to the Mardi Gras, a flash crowd event getting its high not from what’s on display as much as what’s in the bar.

Sharan Apparao learned that to her cost the year she asked Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi, at that time Salman Rushdie’s eye-candy, to attend her opening in the city. Everyone remembered the statuesque actor, no one could recall the exhibition. Still, Chennai-based Apparao has both a home and a year-round presence in the city, famously in its Aman Hotel where gym members moving in and out of their workout sessions are exposed to the artists she represents. You couldn’t imagine those works anywhere else — least of all in Mumbai.

This time last year, when the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art opened in the South Court Mall in South Delhi, it let loose a frenzied lot amidst the well-heeled as groupies, freeloaders and gatecrashers soaked up the Burgundy and the Chardonnay amidst the artworks — on most days, the museum is careful enough not to permit visitors to carry even a bottle of water on the premises. This year, at its new exhibition, Kiran Nadar made sure that cocktails were served in a separate area and guests did not carry their drinks and eatables within the premises. But the big openings seemed just as crowded — last year, the launch of Saffronart’s Delhi office at the The Oberoi coincided with Sotheby’s dinner at the same venue, ruining the mojo of the hotel as guests gatecrashed both events and jammed the corridors, glasses of wine in hand, while the hotel’s kitchens were hard put to find anything at all to fill the chafing dishes that kept running out of whatever was put into them. This year, with both events once again on the same evening, the crowd was at least dispersed as the venues were split between The Oberoi and The Imperial.

When Art Alive opened its second gallery in Gurgaon, the whole city, it seemed, had turned up to celebrate. It would be fair to mention that promoter Sunaina Anand had blitzed everyone with cards, emails and text messages, but the guests stayed long past the partying hour, then walked down the road to the hotel where dinner was being served without loosening their grip on their wine glasses — behaving like baraatis on a rampage rather than art connoisseurs at an opening.

Not many of those turned up again at museum or office or gallery to view what they might have missed on those bacchanalian outings, but no one was crying hoarse as they gathered for the fourth edition of the India Art Fair because in spite of its hedonism and its insensitivity, its aggression and its gall, New Delhi is consolidating its base as the country’s art capital that puts its money where its mouth is.

Not that Mumbai is loath to buy. Mumbai may have lost the crown of the mostest to Delhi, but when it was Bombay, it was the uncontested centre of the Indian art world. There were several reasons for Bombay usurping that position from Calcutta in the last century. For starters, there was the Bombay Art Society, the annual outing for artists who could participate in different categories, and who hoped to win the eye of patrons with their gold and silver medals — and if they were fortunate, of the critics, who at the time were not just influential but also lent support to the artists they believed in. That critics Rudy von Leden, Walter Langhammer and Emanuel Schlesinger were also collectors could be one of the reasons for the rise and stranglehold for the best part of several decades of the Bombay artists at the unfair cost of the Delhi painters who never got the same exposure. That Calcutta was the crucible of Indian art was highlighted with the opening this week of a monster-sized show on Bengal art by Delhi-based Ashish Anand who enviably owns the largest collection of Indian modern art from around the country.

Earlier, it was Bombay that had the collectors, not least among the Parsis, who have always supported the arts. Proof of this was the sale, last year, of the estate of Jehangir Nicholson. What started as a one-off sale to fund renovations for the National Centre for Performing Arts grew into a full-fledged house sale later, and a third value-added sale of miniature paintings from the Nicholson collection will take place next month. It is interesting that these sales have been conducted by Pundole’s, an art gallery that patronised the modernists, and has managed to keep a distance from the jiggery-pokery associated with the art world, and which for the purpose of the Nicholson collection turned itself over into an auction house — “with no calendar”, Dadiba Pundole told this writer ahead of his maiden sale, “so we will have auctions when the need arises”. Support for the Nicholson collection of art — also jewellery, carpets, furniture and extensive tea, coffee and dinner sets — came from the Parsi community.

Charity organisation Khushii has a perfectly good handle on the pulse of art collectors in New Delhi, where it is based and also does much of its fund-raising, as well as that of Mumbai. Some years back, Aman Nath thought up the idea of involving industrialists, socialites and politicians alongside artists when painting canvases and then auctioning them. At the Delhi event, hosted at the British High Commissioner’s residence, the bidding was furiously high, fuelled by alcohol and accompanied by much laughter — the deliverance of money for the auctioned lots over the days was less commensurate, or so it was rumoured. The following year, at another auction by Khushii based on a similar format in Mumbai, no bidder turned renegade.

Till a few years ago, sales were skewed to such an extent that Mumbai controlled the art market with as much as 70 per cent of all art sales — the Progressives and the modernists, which the city had nurtured, making up the bulk of that business. In the last decade, the balance between Bombay and New Delhi evened out with a growing interest and rising business opportunities in the capital. Boutique galleries have boomed, starting out as garage establishments and maturing into swank galleries with cafes, bookshops and private viewing rooms attached. Today — and much like its car population — Delhi has more galleries than the rest of the country put together.

Lado Sarai has developed as an art district because of its low rentals, Hauz Khas Village has always been home to several, the main road in front of Defence Colony has signages for existing and forthcoming galleries and Vadehra’s façade announces a Picasso-Souza show, and the presence of Yoko Ono. The renovated Lalit Kala Akademi galleries are now hosting huge exhibitions, the city has always had its National Gallery of Modern Art, and there is, of course, the India Art Fair that’s just pushed up the ante for the unregulated Rs 1,500 crore Indian art market.

Auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s, that earlier maintained a presence in Mumbai for its sophistication, are now more visible at outings in New Delhi because of the city’s famous buying clout of Rs 400-500 crore annually. Mumbai may have more of the Bollywood glitterati, but Delhi has the larger homes and the chutzpah of nouveau flash. Where Mumbai is saturated, Delhi is greedy and grasping — the market may not be as knowledgeable about art, but it is more aspirational. It also has the only private museums in the country, the bigger galleries and the better infrastructure. In spite of its earlier start, no Mumbaikar has yet created any art facility to make the city proud —a gap Neville Tuli’s Osianama had hoped to use to catalytic effect. The turnout at the Nicholson gallery in a wing of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya in April last year was an indication of how much the Mumbaikar values any addition to its legacy—not least by way of an ordered presence at its opening when no one crossed the line demarcating the public areas from the artworks. In Delhi, where such lines are as inconsequential as the traffic lanes on its roads, besides the Kiran Nadar Museum of Modern Art, there is the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon in a building that many regard as an installation as well. Fewer people might walk in on a daily basis but they make Mumbai’s Jehangir Art Gallery resemble nothing so much as a veritable dump.

With the two cities vying for the art market, what of the artists themselves? Mumbai had its masters at one time, though most stayed in migratory mode, but its current roster includes everyone from Akbar Padamsee down to the Dodiyas (Atul and Anju), Jitish Kallat and others, artists whose reference points are global. In Delhi, where the locally rooted remains much more significant and the language is abstemiously Indian, the stars in residence are Subodh Gupta and Bharti Kher, but the habitat is turning much more nurturing with the return from France of S H Raza (who, ironically, launched his career in Bombay) and the winter migration from the same climes of Sakti Burman. Kolkata artists, those who do think of leaving their home — and many do — often choose Delhi with its affordable real estate, larger studios and, of course, its booming market over Mumbai to make their home.

Where does that leave the other cities? If ever a city were to make top grade in art appreciation, that would be Kolkata where art-viewers actually return to the exhibitions after the formal opening — unheard of in Delhi — sometimes with their newspapers and books, to sit reading while surrounded by art. They also know their art better, and while this can result in no mean addabaazi, while in the gallery they would prefer to look at rather than talk about the art — n particular its art critics who will treat you with chilly disdain should you attempt to strike up a conversation. Bangalore is still too raw, Chennai too conservative, and the other cities have no infrastructure yet that allows an art culture to develop, leave alone a market. Collectively, they would be hard put to contribute even 10 per cent to the overall art market.

As the India Art Fair winds down in New Delhi, complete with the collateral events, razzle-dazzle mega-openings and boozy gossip sessions, it’s time to check the bottomlines, review the artists who’re selling, the prices and, of course, the sizes. Because no matter what Mumbai does, Delhi is aspiring to do better. Even if it means larger doses of single malt to write out the fatter cheque as the partying gets underway.