Death, divorce and distress are the reasons why most people sell art
Dinesh Vazirani
Death, divorce and distress are the reasons why most people sell art
Dinesh Vazirani, Co-founder of Saffronart, takes Rotarians through the history of Indian art, the contemporary art market and Saffronart
I think most people here know Dinesh Vazirani. So this is a very short introduction. Dinesh has been a friend for many years. He walked into my gallery in 1995 and we started chatting about art. He also purchased a painting from me. Little did I know that it was the beginning of a very interesting art journey for us. At that time, there were barely 10 galleries in Mumbai. In 2000, Dinesh walked in once again and this time told me about his vision for selling art on the net. It was an amazingly unheard of idea, way ahead of its time. He asked whether I would be a partner gallery and I said, “Yes.” He went on to art auctions on the net, started Saffronart and earned himself the title of an innovator with exemplary vision. His innovative spirit has taken the art business in India to another level. I leave Dinesh to share his art journey with all of you.
-Rtn. Ritu Desai
Thank you, Ritu. And thank you, Rotary, for having me. I’m going to talk about art in general. Covering 150 years is not going to be easy. Hopefully, by the end of it, you will understand a little bit of the history of Indian art — at least for the last 150 years. You will also understand how to look at art, the kind of issues faced when you look at art and a little bit about the art market itself. I will end with a snippet about Saffronart and what we do.
Like all good stories in India, I’m going to start with the story of a prince. The prince was from Travancore in Kerala. His name was Raja Ravi Varma. He was trained in a very English academic, realistic style of painting. But he was rooted in India and started painting subjects, which were common. His subjects included kings, princes, peasants, gods, goddesses and deities. And that in a way took Indian art to the masses. People could relate with his paintings. He was so rooted with that English academic style of painting that even when he painted Indian subjects, he painted them with fair skin. What happened with Ravi Varma was that almost everyone had a form of his painting at their home. So, in the late 1800s, under British rule, he laid the foundation of taking art to the people.
After him, in the early 1900s, we move to Bengal. Back then Bengal was the seat of learning and literature. Bengal artists such as Rabindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose and Gaganendranath Tagore took what Raja Ravi Varma did, but brought some romance to it. The tones became softer and there was a dream-like quality to their paintings. That was the kind of identity they were trying to carve for themselves with their own style and influence.
From the early 1900s we move to the 1920s. In the 1920s came Gandhi and with Gandhi came simplicity. Simple lines, forms and images that everyone could relate to. An artist who followed that simplicity was Jamini Roy. And Jamini Roy is a man, not a woman. He took those simple lines and created things, which were even more in relation to the general masses.
In 1947, we got our independence from the British. And a group called The Progressive Artists’ Group was formed. Artists such as S. H. Raza, F. N. Souza and M. F. Husain formed the group. Souza was the founder. If we talk about the birth of modern Indian art, it happened in 1947 with this group. Souza wanted to challenge the establishment. He wanted to challenge religion and challenge the way we were thinking about Indian art. Husain, another master, took very simple subjects such as folk and tribal art and painted them in his own style.
In the 1960s, there was a search for what is Indian-ness. Who is an Indian painter and how does he identify himself? Artists Krishen Khanna, Tyeb Mehta and Ram Kumar pushed Indian art further by discovering and merging western influences with Indian influences to form an identity that was
purely Indian.
In the 1970s there was a change towards the figurative style. And that was because of the Emergency in our country. The Emergency took away the basic rights of the people and artists rebelled against that through this style. As we progress, art in any country is a representation of the political and social environment that the artist lives in. They paint what challenges them.
In 1991 came the globalisation of India when Manmohan Singh started the whole process of taking India to the world. Another group of artists called “Contemporary Artists” came into existence. They painted with mixed media, objects and things that they found around them. But they took away that Indian-ness a little bit. It was more of global art.
So if you look at the last 100 years, you can broadly divide history into two categories — artists born before India’s independence, who were learning to break away from the colonial hangover, and the contemporary movement post 1947. Each category is defined by a changing cultural idiom.
The question people often ask is “How do I look at art? I mean, I see a painting but I see nothing. I don’t understand it.” There are simple things to look for when you look at paintings. That’s aesthetics. You look at the aesthetic quality of the work, which is how the work looks as an image. You look at the artist, the rarity, significance and provenance. All provenance means is the chain of ownership. If the painting was owned by a great collector of Indian art then it has better prominence than the one that has come straight from the artist’s studio.
Apart from provenance, condition of the work, publication, where the art was exhibited and size play an important role. Size — larger the painting, the better it is. Not necessarily. Then comes medium and surface, where people feel canvas is better than paper. Probably not. Then there are prices of the comparable works — higher the better. That also doesn’t work.
So I put these three separately because when we talk about the art market and look at art prices, we have to be a little careful. There is an investment angle to art. When you look at the investments and the aesthetics, it’s a dichotomy. Investment, in many ways, is more data planning and intellect analysis. Aesthetics is observation, intuition and expertise. Aesthetics is sensory contemplation and appreciation of an object.
When you look at a painting, there are several aspects. The strongest aspect of a painting is line. You observe how an artist uses line on a paper or canvas. Is it bold, stringy or wavy? Form is another aspect of looking at a painting. The best balance of form was founded in India many centuries ago. In temples, carvings, stone and bronze. And that’s the three axes position. It’s called the tribhanga. The most pleasing form to a viewer is when the human figure is bent in three axes.
Then we have colour. How is the application of colour in a painting? The master of colour is Raza. He brings out the mood in his painting with colour. If you are looking at texture then look for paintings by Akbar Padamsee. Absence of any texture is also a form of texture and that’s what Tyeb Mehta does. A flat painting with nothing sticking out except flat colours. But the flatness of the texture draws you squarely to the principal image. Mood is what the painting does to me. Gaitonde is the master of mood. He layered paintings and used minimal colour to create a mood.
The last one is concept, and concept applies more to the contemporary artists. Younger artists who use stainless steel utensils or create images, which grab you, from the things that they see around them. For them, concept is more important
than execution.
Now I’m going to talk to you about the market. The art market in India sees artists do exhibitions with galleries and dealers. And gallery dealers sell artworks to buyers. Buyers sell in the secondary market through auction houses, dealers or galleries to other buyers. There are three Ds in art as to why people sell. They are called death, divorce and distress. And in some way, those gruesome three Ds help the secondary market survive. Galleries, of course, are defining and developing artists.
If you look at the world art market, China is the largest art market in the world with about 41%. The Indian art market hardly exists in this pie chart. It is less than 1%. So we are really far away from where we should be.
I’m going to look back at the year 2000, when Saffronart started. From 2000 to 2002, the entire global Indian art auction market was between three to four million dollars. And then it slowly started increasing in 2003 and 2004. Non-resident Indians suddenly realised this is ridiculous. This is our culture, this is Indian art.
And it cannot be so cheap. They became the principal buyers of Indian art between the years 2002 and 2005. The market jumped drastically during that period. A lot of paintings were trying to reach the INR6,236,357 mark. Something dramatic happened in 2005. A painting came up for auction and got sold for INR94 million. That caught all of us in the trail. We wondered if this is a flash in the pan. Is this reality? In the subsequent years, an incredible amount of masterpieces were sold for a million dollars. There was a lot of confidence in the market that believed there were enough buyers out there to treasure and value Indian artists.
In the years that followed, the market hovered around that INR8,731 million and stagnated. People were charged up, artists and galleries had become unreasonable and auction house prices went crazy. An example of what happened in those three years — artist Subodh Gupta’s painting sold in Saffronart in 2004 for INR1,123 thousand. The same painting in 2008 sold for INR53,633 thousand. That was the kind of money people were making when they were buying and
selling paintings.
The financial crisis of 2008, however, changed the Indian art market. It collapsed. From INR8,731 million it fell to INR2,931 million. The buyers became sellers. When it came to Indian contemporary art, the galleries in India were so enamoured by people from outside India that every time an Indian went to buy a painting, they said, “I’m sorry, it’s going to the international museum.” So in some ways it blocked Indians from buying contemporary art.
Over the next few years, however, the art market made a comeback and there are many opportunities now. There has been a slow growth with more auction houses, museums and institutions coming up in India. Now, it’s the real collectors who want to buy art and hang it on their walls to appreciate it. It’s a much stronger market. It’s a market that is poised for greater success with record prices. So I think now we are developing the Indian art market for the next phase with the right fundamentals and the right approach.
Coming to Saffronart — it was started by my wife and me, 13 years ago. It has been an exciting journey for many reasons. We met some of the greatest minds and some of the greatest artists in India. We had the chance to get to know them as friends, as colleagues, as people we could appreciate and interact with. Harvard Business School has even done a case study on Saffronart, which was introduced in the MBA class. Professors spent almost 6 to 8 months coming to India — back and forth — to write the case study. It was nice to go back and sit on the other side to learn what they had to say.
We have galleries in Mumbai, Delhi, New York and London. We don’t do only art — we do jewellery, objects, collectibles and unique properties. We also do folk and tribal art, impression art and carpets, vintage cars and furniture. So it’s been quite a journey from art to other collectibles. Saffronart was one of the first few companies in the world to launch an iPad application and a mobile-bidding application. And in our first auction, we got a mobile bid of INR62 million. I think that was probably the highest paid, on a mobile phone for an M-commerce application. I think if we can use technology at Saffronart and leverage 5000 years of Indian culture — not only through art but also through objects, collectibles, etc. — then I think it will be a dream come true. Thank you.
Excerpts from a Q&A session:
Q: What criteria do you see when you choose an artist? Also, I hear that auction houses buy directly from the artists. What’s your take on that?
Dinesh Vazirani: I think the art market is a pyramid and in some ways no matter what has happened in the past, the pyramid doesn’t change. There are those artists who will always remain at the top because they have exhibited internationally, have historical reference and lots of reasons behind their success. Those artists always go into auction. And I think there is a whole other tier of artists — based on their international acclaim, based on the so-called demand they create and based on the critique they are selected for auctioning. Younger artists also go into auction. Coming to your second question, I don’t think that is really true. Because then auction houses are a consignment platform. If you look at most auction house catalogues, there is a symbol marked there saying that the auction house has ownership interest in this work. You have to be clear to the buyer if you have a vested interest. You cannot mislead the buyer.
Q: What made you leave your father’s business? Was it the passion for art or was it the opportunity of a business?
Dinesh Vazirani: I went to Stanford in 1985 to do electrical engineering. That is what my father wanted me to do. I went up to this Greek professor of mine and said that I loved art. She asked, “Why don’t you do art?” But there was no chance, in 1985, that my father was going to let me do art. So I did a co-term programme — where I could do my Bachelors in Art and my Masters in Engineering. I then came back to the family business after my MBA and joined my father. My passion for art, however, never disappeared. In 2000, when the Internet boom happened, my wife and I wondered if we could merge art and technology. No one believed it would. They said art has to be seen; you have to walk up to it and enjoy it. It is not going to work on the Internet.
But we plugged on. I took a one-year sabbatical from the family business. That one year became ten years. Finally, we sold our family business about two years ago. Many people say that I am lucky to be in a field or industry of my passion. It is good and bad. Because on one hand it is obsessive, while on the other, it gives a lot of gratification.
Q: For a particular artist, is price per square inch relevant across all their works?
Dinesh Vazirani: That’s a bad term in the art world, this price per square inch. There were all these reports about mis-selling price per square inch. But it has no relevance. To give you an example, a small work by artist Rabindranath Tagore can sell for R2-3 crores. In fact, that’s why I put size right at the bottom and all the other factors on top. The other important factors include where it has come from, what is the condition, what is the significance of the painting in the artist’s life, has it been published, etc. All these things become more important and takes that “price per square inch” out. And I really hope it doesn’t come back.