| Amateur collectors all start off making the same mistake: they tend to sideline the gallerist in an attempt to shrink the artist’s price.
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| While this may work sometimes, for a serious collector, the role of the gallerist is paramount.
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| The gallerist charges a hefty fee, true, but over time, as collectors develop a relationship with the gallerist, the fee becomes a tradeable commodity, not dissimilar to an artist’s work.
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| What’s important is the gallerist’s access to an artist’s works in the public domain that may go up for secondary sale, and the ability to track provenance.
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| Today, there’s no doubting that when looking for works by M F Husain, the best point might well be Vadehra Art Gallery, that Kumar Gallery is associated with works by F N Souza, and that if you need to track the works of Manjit Bawa, you could do worse than pay Cymroza Art Gallery a visit, while Pundole Art Gallery would be the obvious choice for works by Akbar Padamsee.
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| While, obviously, the top-notch gallerists might be your best bet, often even a relationship with someone setting up new in the business could stand you in good stead.
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| With the art business booming, galleries and gallerists now have access to far greater funds.
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| As a result, they have started cataloguing their exhibitions — one of the most important steps in tracing an artist’s works through his career, and certainly the biggest ticket to the tricky business of provenance.
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| Increasingly, too, the quality of the catalogues is improving, and sponsors are funding books on painters and even sculptors.
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| The latest, for instance, is a volume on sculptor K S Radhakrishnan brought out by Sunaina Anand of Art Alive with funding from the French TMI Foundation.
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| Gallerists these days also tend to build, stock and invest in their own collections.
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| When prices rise, they release these paintings into the market on a selective basis — and woe be yours if you have tried to eliminate the gallerist from the process of acquiring art in the past.
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| Owner-driven galleries are often a good pit stop for building such relationships.
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| While the Visual Arts Gallery at India Habitat Centre is probably the best place to exhibit in Delhi, you might have to turn to Sharan Apparao of Apparao Galleries, Chennai, or Katayun Saklat in Kolkata for helping you trace an elusive artist.
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| If in the beginning gallerists appear expensive, later into your collecting years the same gallerists might help you get works cheaper than the market price (because they were purchased earlier at a lower premium, and because of a relationship between the artist and the gallerist).
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| But there are reasons other than the purely monetary to seek the guidance of a gallerist. He or she studies trends, can tell you whose works to collect at a certain point and whose to sell off.
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| In that sense, they are not unlike stock market analysts, and so the time you spend nurturing a relationship with a gallerist might well be the most critical one in your life as an art collector. |
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Content Guide
