Vadehra: Sadly what you are saying is true, the number of people is small at the top-end and that needs to go up. To that extent I can share the blame with the trade that maybe we faulted somewhere or maybe we haven’t promoted art the way it should have been promoted in the last 5 years.

Now the efforts by all of us are getting better and we will see this investor base going up. We are going into publication of books, we are doing seminars and lot of collective activity in which people learn how to enjoy art and people learn the aesthetic sensibilities, people learn about the markets. So I think the trade, to a certain extent has to be blamed, why the market is shallow.

Having said that we do constitute 4% of the world’s billionaires. Among the BRIC countries Brazil, China and Russia are ahead of us in art and so our prices have a long way to go and right now we are making a judgment of a market which is just 4-5 years old. So we must give it more time and we will be strongly off.

Q: Your thoughts on how shallow this market is or do you keep encountering the same set of 12 people at every art auction or every gallery opening?

Sumeet Chopra: To be fair, at the gallery opening one doesn’t know whether those are the guys who are buying or not, or they just are there to look at the art.

And so, there maybe a whole lot of people who aren’t seen at the art auctions or who don’t come to the party, who maybe buying it.

But the sense I get is that everybody is trying to come to these auctions and are trying to figure out when, or who is the next hot guy/ artist that needs to be bought. So, in a sense I don’t see the maturity of the market as it is in the West.

And unless we get to that mature level, I don’t think we are going to be okay with 400 people or 500 people in this market. The kind of market that we have, you need to have a lot more people involved in it and a lot more people wanting to buy that art.

Secondly, before any artist can be worth talking about, he is suddenly already priced between 8-10 lakhs. And so, the guy who has Rs 2-3 lakhs to spend on a good piece of art is not getting the art. So by the time you get to have a feel that this is the artist I really need to buy; and it is also going to be a reasonable investment because at the end of the day, if one is spending Rs 5-10 lakh, he/she wouldn’t want their money to depreciate. It would be nice for the buyer if his art goes up.

But by the time he gets to a position where he can even look at the artist which will be the one that critics are going to like or which will go reasonably up, the price of the artist is already Rs 10 lakh and that kind of takes away 75-80% of the people who want to buy art out of the equation in any case.

We need to find a way where people segregate and find younger artists or some kind of art critics who speak about these young artist, show them or if not shows then audio-video presentations of guys from Baroda School or Bengal school or any art colleges and say that these the new guys, we think they are nice. Thus people get a chance to get these artists at a nascent stage and not when they are 8-10 lakhs a piece.

Q: Things were different when you started off a few years back, then prices had not reached these kinds of levels, in fact people must have bought your work for thousands of rupees, do you think that there is something in what Chopra is saying that the entry level has gone to a kind of a threshold which automatically rules out a large part of the population?

Baiju Parthan: That is absolutely right because even the art students who are coming fresh out of college, their work costs more than a lakh and it was not the case earlier, one would sell for a few thousands.

And I think, that would prevent a lot of people who would actually like to get into study an artist, move with that artist for a while - that kind of freedom of movement or that kind of a relationship factor gets cut off because of this price. That is one of the negative sides of the price increase which as an artist one experiences, that sort of an intimate connection between a patron or a collector and artist has slowly vanished and that is definitely a point.

At the same time, I think it’s a market which is in its nascent stage, Indian art on the whole, is just getting on its feet, its just beginning to take strides. It’s a long way to go and it would be a bit too hasty for us to make judgments at this point in that sense.

But having said that I would agree that the new artist, the young ones who have come out their prices are a bit unrealistic. There should be some kind of system by which one can make it more accessible to maintain a healthy environment.

Q: How can a gallery resolve this price issue because even young artists, who have hardly done a single solo show or a couple of solo shows, are already hitting the Rs 10 lakh price racket?

Vadehra: We need to have a very wide spread of galleries in the country. Right now, we do not have more than 20-30 good galleries all over the country, which is too small a number.

The number of galleries have to go up and the whole art market cannot be confined only to Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta and to an extent, in Chennai and Bangalore. It has to spread out and when it does, we will have enough students passing out of Masters in Fine Arts, or MFA, to fill in these places.

I was discussing with Baiju Parthan the other day and he said that there are maybe 300 students who pass out of MFA every year. Seven years of training in Fine Arts is a lot of training.

So, I think the number of galleries have to go up and they have to show more and more young artists. Any one gallery cannot perhaps have more than 10-12 shows a year. So, that is a limiting factor in terms of the number of shows that can be had and the number of young artists that can be exposed.

Q: Last few months, people have been talking about how maybe there is a clear shift away from buying masters and moving to contemporary art, I just want to tie in that with the profile that you spoke about, when you talk to many of the guys who buy in our auctions, do you find a lot of young people, maybe investment bankers, hedge fund managers etc, who probably are more turned on by contemporary artists rather than the old masters, could that be the reason why this shift is happening?

Vazirani: Definitely. We find the collector base getting younger.

Also in many ways, if you look at the global art market, contemporary art is really taken the world by storm and I think that is also because we live in a contemporary generation. I think we can identify with those kind of images, which are bold, which kind of use different media, different materials and I think you find a kind of younger base of collectors that has more in connection with contemporary art than with the modern masters.

That is because, they live today and this art being produced today is the reflection of the times. Art, in general, is the reflection of a country, society and polity and I think the contemporary art is identified with that society and polity and produced their art like that.

Q: Would you agree that some of the contemporary artists are probably striking a bigger chord with the new set of buyers rather than modern masters like yourself?

Akbar Padamsee: Well I can’t really say because I don’t know the business of art. All discussions that I have heard just now, is about the business of art, which I am not familiar with. I only know my viewpoint and the artist’s viewpoint.

Q: When you interact with a lot of your collectors, do you get the sense that probably people are shifting away from the modern masters and getting more attracted towards contemporary artists like yourself?

Baiju Parthan: It is not that collectors are moving away from modern masters. These are two different sensibilities. The collectors who end up and collect Indian masters are still doing that and a new set of collectors have come who are younger and can relate to issues and the kind of language that contemporary artists are using. They are moving towards these younger artists.

It is quite natural for that sort of an identification or resonance to happen. When we speak of the Indian modern masters, they are living in times where issues of nationality and identity have a new republic or are of small importance. The kind of material they were using in their work and the subject matters are very different from what we are hearing today.

We are dealing more with the urban phenomenon, issues of information revolution, the politics of identity, and a lot of things like that. The new collectors relate to those issues because they are living that reality. I think these are two distinct streams of sensibilities coming together. In a sense, I don’t think anybody is moving away from the modern masters.

Q: We were just discussing the issue of commissions and we have spoken about the profiles of buyers etc. What about the trade in India? Would you say the trade is quite weak in the art market out here?

Arun Vadehra: The number of players, galleries, and promoters has to really go up. The people who have come into the art business are far and few and have really committed themselves to it. Others are carrying out this business more as a hobby and pastime. It is a fairly different and exciting business today. We need better people to come in and I am sure they will also.

Q: Are the players in the market, including intermediaries, part of the reason why prices and price structures tend to be a bit shaky?