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| What price is the right price? |
| Kishore Singh / New Delhi Nov 25, 2009, 00:01 IST |
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Collectors are finding it difficult to put a value to artists, making investments in art risky.
If collectors feel jittery about art prices, it is often with good reason. History — which in the world of art translates to mean longevity — is one way to assess an artist’s price over a period of time, but when the markets are volatile, as they are now, even these benchmarks are no longer the bedrocks of pricing. Where does the collector turn next for fiscal advice? Auctions, which created some of the watershed peaks, are no longer trusted — the high prices shed light less on art market stability and more on art buyer gullibility. Galleries, once considered partners when it came to investing in artists, are vulnerable to pricing pressures because they hold inventories they need to get rid of — but it remains to be seen whether this is because they want them sold at any price, which could be detrimentally low, or because the stock was bought at high price points so they suggest that buyers pick up even new or different works by the same artist at similar prices to defend their own price line.
This leaves just two other players within the gambit — the artist and the collector. While “nexus” might be a strong word to use, prices were often arrived at between artists and their galleries collectively, and as prices began to soar, the artist increasingly began to play a stronger role in the relationship. Often, the final price was decided by the artist based on greed, or gut, sometimes both, and sometimes neither, and often against the advice of the gallery. The result was that often artists’ works were priced extraordinarily and also inexplicably high against the tacit advice of gallerists. It is these artists who are now in trouble, and it is these works that are now difficult to put a value to.
The market now belongs to the few artists who stood the ground, and even though their prices were considered high, they were not unreal. Naturally, this is not a large body of artists, and equally they must have been considered too avuncular by galleries who could not make a killing on their behalf. Yet, these grounded artists are now finding survival easier and are less impacted by the crash of the art market than several of their peers.
In the past weeks, I have had a chance to meet with several players in the art market. As an illustration of the latter, an artist who created a great deal of hype around his works without succumbing to the industry clamour for raising his prices, says his prices have not suffered in the last year because he has stood the test of time as well as loyalty. While his art has come for critical review by promoters, he has not had to offer discounts. “Sometimes when collectors insist,” he told me, “I lower my price from, say, Rs 15 lakh to Rs 13 lakh, but that is all.”
Take, on the other hand, another artist, more popular and quite the flavour among his peer group of contemporaries, whose watercolours at their peak were priced at Rs 20 lakh. After the crash, some of these works have been doing the rounds at different exhibitions around the country as well as around the world, being downgraded to Rs 17 lakh, then Rs 12 lakh, and now on offer at Rs 8 lakh, but, even at that price, remain unsold.
Some readers of this column have argued that an earlier claim that prices for most contemporary artists have fallen by as much as 70 per cent do not stand up to scrutiny, yet, as this instance illustrates, with works unsold at a 60 per cent discount, clearly the market for this intellectually celebrated painter is still lower. What this tells you about pricing is that you will have to create your own benchmarks. Serious investors tell you that this is the best time to buy up contemporaries — but is it? Prices will rise, agree punters, but slowly. Meanwhile, when I asked a gallerist normally associated with contemporary artists, about the marquee names to invest in, her advice was both contrary to her earlier thinking, and terse: “Buy moderns,” she said. QED?
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