Knights of the art

The moneyed world is a level-playing field for both seasoned and wannabe collectors

Bangladeshi couple Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani are enjoying their status as Serious Art Buyers, the rush that comes when prices rise and fall on the basis of their patronage. Art consumers get an adrenaline rush from their shopping lists because they wield a power that doesn’t occur when you splurge, for instance, on a luxury car, or a watch. But spend on art and you can expect to be feted with champagne, and can ask for and probably get caviar served up for your morning face-pack. The Samdanis are recent entrants to this privileged set, invited to power lunches and dinners hosted by auction houses in London and New York where they might discuss their experience at Basel among the cognoscenti, or share their bewilderment about Documenta in Kassel. Their opinion is sought, and as you read this, some high-powered art committee somewhere is probably wondering about inviting them on board a trust or foundation

 

It’s the most fun you can have spending money. Actually, fashionistas get to share some of the same experience. If you buy loads of a brand, you can be sure to be invited for the Paris or Milan fashion weeks, but fashion is airhead stuff, frothy and frivolous. Art, on the other hand, has an intellectual make-up. So, you’re wooed like the Medicis without whom the Renaissance would have collapsed on its face like a fried egg left out too long in the rain. Your word is the golden oracle around which the industry of curators, writers, auctioneers, gallerists and the whole shebang of artists revolves, a person of wisdom, a purveyor of taste.

It’s hard not to be seduced by the frills. To have special openings ahead of the pack, wooed as a speaker, celebrated as a visionary, chased by the paparazzi. If you buy a Bell helicopter, the auditor will want to know why you didn’t opt for the cheaper Westland; if you buy a headache-inducing installation, someone somewhere will want to send you away on a cruise with other collectors, all expenses paid — what’s not to like about it? It’s akin to buying rather than earning a knighthood, something any Johnny-come-lately can do with stirrups on provided you’ve made your presence felt with a bid for a tag that’s eye-poppingly large. The moneyed world is a level playing field for both seasoned and wannabe collectors, but as someone wise said, one generation’s aspirant is the next generation’s role model.

We may not have had the equivalent of the Rothschilds and Penny Guggenheims, but before there were the de Boers and the Alexanders, there were collectors such as Russi Modi or, even, more recently, Harsh Goenka. But it is the nascent collectors that are being feted. When Tina Ambani bid for her record-breaking F N Souza, Birth, she found the Peabody Essex not only wanted a loan of the painting, they also put her on their museum board. Kiran Nadar, Anupam Poddar, Rajshree Pathy and others among their peers have been speakers and movers on the international art circuit

For years, it was the Americans who made up the buying world, followed closely by Europeans who’d made London their home. For a decade now, Indians have been nibbling at the cheese as they toy with their Husains and Souzas, unwilling to take the plunge further unlike their Chinese peers, 1.1 million of whom make up the smorgasbord of the world’s largest art market. Inscrutable they’re not – heck, didn’t someone pay Rs 550 crore for a painting by Picasso? — and there’ll be a lot of champagne lunches till some Indian betters that.

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Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated