June 7, 2003

Gallery rivalries, undercuttings, spinning false auras about art and artists, altering fixed prices, trafficking in fakes and taking advantage of artists in need are common happenings on today’s growing art scene, writes Salwat Ali

Investment in art has escalated considerably over the last few years as new customers enter the arena giving rise to the phenomenon of the popular market. Hitherto art buying here in the post-Partition decades was confined to the elite cadres, the connoisseur collectors or the finicky odd buyer.

Today a number of multinationals, specially petroleum and pharmaceutical companies, the private banking sector and hotel chains are evincing a keen sensitivity to environment and culture. They are allocating specific budgets to support and promote the arts.

Paintings and art works ranging in the Rs5,000-8,000 variety are popular buys with these companies as they make suitable presentation or gift items in their PR itinerary. Steeply priced, large, decorative pieces or murals are also in demand to spruce up offices, foyers, lobbies, halls and vantage interior locations.

A gallery curator who often deals with such clients remarked that “art promotion is just a front. These organizations are actually diverting some of the tax deductible funds into the arts and formerly, a sizable budget was reserved for the production of diaries and calenders. With new government imposition and tax levies on these items such ventures are no longer feasible. So a market for middle order art has suddenly burgeoned. The buying officials often have no knowledge about the aesthetic qualities of the art works and they are picked up as mere commodities.”

A demand and supply assembly line of sorts has been generated and today there is the proliferation of predictable, marketable art of a certain range and order.

As art becomes de rigueur its reputation as an upscale lifestyle adjunct has also grown. Generally purchasers in this category are women. A knowledgeable gallery owner points out that “98 per cent of the buyers are women for the lowly priced new art. They only bring in their husbands when heavy expenses are involved as in vintage pieces or mature art works.”

These ladies may have some basic feel for the look of the art work but prefer to rely on the curators in knowledge of the work and its worth. As ladies of money and leisure, they frequently scour exhibitions, in the manner they formerly haunted boutiques, almost always booking best buys before the inauguration of the show.

Some of the old-time rich families in the country also have a longstanding stake in the arts. They have been quiet buyers over a period of many years. The generations having grown up with their parents’ art ethos are serious buyers now. Joining them are certain business communities with a newly acquired awareness who are patronizing certain “safe” genres of art, popular within their relevant circles. They are also decorating their abodes in various international locales with a nationalist Pakistani art, and are known to buy in bulk on discounted rates.

In this very commercial scenario it is a joy to hear a senior curator exclaim “I am extremely happy with the new, young educated couples who are deeply involved with the aesthetics of art and are building their collections gradually. They are not buying for investment purposes, they have a genuine curiosity and awareness and want to live with their artworks.”

Almost all the gallery curators confirm that artworks were being taken out of the country. One in particular pointed out that “a great deal of art was going out of Pakistan, I would not say high art but custom-made works for hotels, hospitals, and the like in the calligraphy and traditional art genres meant for commercial venues, not museums or personal collections.”

Another gallery owner spoke of a steady customer who brought 15-20 nudes from him twice a year. “She takes them to Singapore where resale profits cover her travel and other expenses,” he said.

Among foreign buyers the younger expatriate generation is also developing an art consciousness and taste for our art.

Stocklot buyers too are giving sustenance to the bourgeois artist and his art. Wholesale deals are struck at reduced rates and dealers profit by adding their own percentage on retails. This arrangement is most lucrative when stocklots are later marketed in a foreign currency.

Some formal collectors have entered the commercial market as sellers too. One such party is known to buy entire exhibitions of the best in middle order art. Remixing this new art with some choice classics collected earlier on, they are staging exclusive showings and reaping sizable value-added profits. The case of a recent sale of a nude with pigeons at an exorbitant price (it was not even on canvas) was all over the grape vine.

Yet another category of buyers was identified by an experienced gallery director. She calls them “a new class of buyers who treat painting as bribery or ‘rishwat’. The deal is negotiated not through hard cash but through paintings. The receiver merely selects works of his choice from the gallery. They are later purchased by the giver; the whole procedure is conducted in a very innocent manner. I term them the morally bankrupt class for whom art is just another acquisition they trade into for the favours granted.”

The art trade here is dominated by a buyers’ market with a growing horizontal spread rather than a vertical incline. A proliferation of average art responsible for the rise in the sales charts is popularizing art as a lifestyle product not as an aesthetic idiom.

Except for two or three galleries where aesthetics are given priority, the rest are blatantly commercial and do not mind resorting to the seamier side of commerce to cut quick sales. Some oblige customers with many favours beyond the customary cocktails.

Gallery rivalries, undercuttings, spinning false auras about the art and artists, altering fixed prices, trafficking in fakes and taking advantage of artists in need are common happenings on today’s growing art scene. It appears that this is a system in which artists, instead of being supported by the rich in their pursuit of aesthetic values, support the rich in their pursuit of further enrichment. As a consequence, the system encourages capital accumulation more than it does creative ability.

Should this not be a major cause for concern and discontent among the visual art practitioners?

Early bird specials?

Curators cashing in on this instinct oblige with exclusive previews or prior access to the collection to secure quick sales. The general public can view and hanker for the prized painting but they can seldom buy it because it is already spoken for. Incidents of unethical buyers booking a painting with token money and not claiming it later are not entirely uncommon. The simple act of procuring a painting often digresses into tactics of common trading.

Some moneyed clients are so clueless about their requirements that they often expect a curator to perform the services of an interior decorator. He/she is asked to study the designated site and suggest suitable art works. Some enterprising/obliging designers have taken the effort out of tiresome selections.

Their furniture showrooms sport relevant paintings complementing their furniture/decor ensembles and the nouveau rich are none the wiser. A considerable number of begums from this class often buy art to keep up with the Joneses. Then there is a premium on names also and galleries are generally always stocked with works of an artist currently in vogue. — S.A.

‘No guilt’ buyers

A surge in calligraph art, paintings and Arabic text is attributed to the emergence of another affluent strata of begums. Influenced by the teachings of a very popular religious scholar, these ladies have modified their lifestyle habits and where and how they spend their money.

A curator dealing with such clients is doing brisk business in “safe art” i.e. landscapes, abstracts, calligraphies and city scapes.

“They do not want anything with figures and have returned their old figurative paintings with the request that I resell them.” he states. — S.A.

Fakes floating like kites

‘No gallery can be truly successful without dealings in fakes,’confide two independent curators on the prolific production and trade in fakes.

They say that “authorities on Chughtai, Sadequain, Ahmed Parvez, etc. will gradually fade from the scene with the passage of time. Who, then, will authenticate these works?”

Moreover, chances of verification become obscure once artworks are taken away from the home country to other destinations.

A curator discloses that a clone of a living calligraphy master is exporting his lookalikes by the crate load to the Middle East (under whose name?). Fakes are being commissioned by some prestigious collectors for consequent resales. It seems there is much enjoyment in the thrill and rewards of the fraudulent act. — S.A.