Fair city

Checking out Mumbai's Art Expo this weekend.

It’s a truism that a city of new, young, emerging collectors such as Mumbai needs its own art fair, something that now exists in the form of the Art Expo, the second edition of which opened yesterday at the Nehru Centre in Worli, and which will stretch over this weekend as a showing of 28 galleries and a few talks. The more interesting of these was scheduled on Friday and had international collector and trend spotter, Kay Saatchi, pointing out how to identify emerging talent and build a collection, while other speakers today will include Judith Greer, Anjolie Ela Menon and Jittish Kallat, and tomorrow Rajshree Pathy, Bose Krishnamachari, Kirsty Ogg and a panel discussion by experts on buying art in these difficult times.

It is buying art in these times that promoter and organiser Vickram Sethi says is the raison d’être for the Art Expo, which follows in the wake of a hugely successful Indian Art Summit in New Delhi. “Bombay and Delhi are two different continents,” says Sethi — and he isn’t talking of only the distance, though that figures too — “a lot of the new breed of buyers from Bombay can’t go to Delhi to see art,” or at least a lot of art when multiple galleries from around the country, and some from around the world, come together on the same platform. He does insist though that the Mumbai collector is more likely to be a serious connoisseur, and that it’s easier to find buyers for high-value art in Mumbai than in Delhi. (A lot of people in both Mumbai and Delhi might disagree.)

Sethi, who has over two decades of interest in promoting art, is also associated with the annual Giftex trade fair, and given his “domain knowledge”, put it together in the form of the Art Expo, a meeting point, he says as he walks around Nehru Centre, for young artists (“they’re investor-friendly”) as well as for interesting works of F N Souza (“to die for”, from Dhoomimal Gallery), a “superb” bull by P Shinde at Sakshi, Patrick Hughes’ retrospective work at Marigold, a different body of Chittrovanu Mazumdar’s work from the Summit at Dubai’s 1x1 gallery, and a host of the “usual suspects”, he laughs — minus, presumably, M F Husain.

The talkathons might be the magnets for a few, but “the bottomline for any fair is commerce,” says Sethi, and with “Indian art values being so right, this really is the time to buy, or invest in art”. Those footfalls will tell.