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| Calculating value |
| Kishore Singh / New Delhi Apr 08, 2009, 00:18 IST |
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The capriciousness of the markets has people asking: At what price, art?
If you had Rs 10.6 crore to spend, what might you buy with it? Possibly, 30-odd apartments valued upwards of Rs 30 lakh (or maybe a clutch of luxury penthouses); a fleet of 500 Maruti Alto cars (or perhaps 150 sedans); maybe even a small business or two.
So when, last year, someone paid that amount for a painting, a single work by the artist F N Souza at a Christie’s auction, you couldn’t help but ask: What is the value of art? How is it priced? Is there a science to it, or is it purely notional?
There’s nothing like bad financial times to start wondering about the ways people spend money, about how overpriced diamonds are, or the Jaeger-Couture watch/ Tiffany brooch/ Mercedes SLR … take your pick. Which then opens up the debate on real value versus abstract value.
When you buy diamonds, or carpets, a car or a watch, it is a product you invest in which has at the least (and not accounting for the notional or perceived value of the brand) a definite product with a cost inbuilt into it. What happens when you buy art?
Inherently, it is the artist (who is the brand) you buy, though the value of what he uses to create that product is negligible — usually no more than a piece of cloth, some dabs of paint and a frame, worth no more than a few thousand rupees. Sometimes, of course, artists use other materials — shopfuls of utensils, as in the case of Subodh Gupta; metal and stone in the hands of sculptors; sometimes even gold, or silver, or diamonds — but the sum of the scrap has little real value.
Or, to argue another way, when there is an exchange of considerable wealth, in the case of an entrepreneur/industrialist/service provider, there is the creation of public wealth by way of employment to hundreds of people, sometimes for the sum of their lifetimes, provident fund and gratuity extra, while the value an artist creates is restricted to personal wealth in the primary market, and to a handful of people in the secondary market. Why, therefore, are works of art priced so high, and how do you determine their value?
All art is abstraction, and some might argue that currency too is an abstract idea, which might be what led one Swiss artist to say that “in exchanging art for money, we exchange one abstraction for another”. Yet, there is a value of exchange that currency has, an idea that is undefined and ephemeral in the case of art. Now, when art prices have slid down the value scale, sometimes bleeding collectors (and certainly those who have bought into art funds), punters are asking whether art has any value at all, whether it is anything more than aspirational sleight-of-hand value.
To give it historical context, art was the purview of the ruling classes — and therefore artists had to be seen to be creating value that was not affordable, or available, to the masses — and the religious order where, to establish divine links, religious art was imbued with gold and precious stones, which gave it inaccessible (for most) value anyway.
Over the centuries, art became associated with ideas, but the perception of high value continued to be sustained. So much so that found objects worth nothing to us, and of very little worth to ragpickers, when translated into an idea, become art — but how do you put a value to it? As an idea, it might be priceless, but does the idea benefit mankind, or society, or even a few people, and if not, why should it be so ludicrously priced?
I once asked a well-known curator the justification for an artist’s prices, only to have her crack the whip on “this pornography of art prices”, which would have been valid if the artist had not been part of the pricing circus — but it does raise the question: If books, which are about ideas, and fashion, which is about statements, and architecture, which is about space, has a contextualised value, then why must we pay so much for art that the price – rather than the content – becomes more important? The art fraternity might do well to reflect on it if it is to stay relevant when the next, inevitable boom comes around.
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