Column

Sotto Voce

The middle-classes, I remember reading once, were primarily interested in their mortgages and their bowel movements. Of late, we can add real estate prices and share movements. Both subjects offer endless fascination to the bourgeoisie. Whether on a local train or in the drawing room, Mumbaikars are constantly discussing the price of their own apartment or the stock markets.

This gives a sense of economic empowerment to people who otherwise lead sedate and ordinary lives. Participating in the excitement of a rising Sensex gives them the feeling of not being left out in the money-making game, one that was earlier too complex for the ordinary, salaried family.

But what do the rich discuss? They do not have to worry about mortgages - their properties were handed down to them. As for stock investments, they own the companies the junta puts their hard earned money in and their own funds are managed by highly paid investment advisors. So what ticks for them?

In today's India, the rich talk about art. Not the brushstrokes or trends or even the great "art for art's sake" kind of themes, but about prices and investment value. Though the rich, being different from you and me, would never actually say, "The Gaitonde that my father bought is now worth 2 crores," it is the sub-text when they do proclaim "Thank God my father bought that Gaitonde when he held his first ever show." Money is never far away from Mumbai conversations.

The subject of art was, like the stock markets, an esoteric one till not too long ago. Art reviews were summarily shoved in the inside pages of newspapers and barely a few people turned up at art galleries, leave alone bought art. Even in the 1990s, when painters began getting into the media and exhibition openings became society affairs, prices moved up at a sedate pace.

The world has completely changed since then. Thanks to the coverage of high-profile auctions, we know that Tyeb Mehta's painting recently sold for the price of a sprawling flat in Malabar Hill and this was soon topped by a Husain work. In fact, the alleged "friendly rivalry" between the two is covered in the same breathless way as that between Aishwarya Rai and Sushmita Sen or Vajpayee and Advani. Now there is a new art promoter crashing into the society pages every other day, never mind if he cannot tell his Kandinsky from his Kulkarni. The smart dealer realises that merely telling Mrs. Moneybags about how a painting matches the upholstery is not enough; now they have to convince the husband about the investment potential too.

All this is great for art and artists, but one has to ask: isn't this boom a bit too swift and sudden? What happens when it cools down? After all, the stock markets and the property market have been through significant downs in recent memory. Thousands of people lost their life's savings in the two crashes that followed the Harshad Mehta and Ketan Parekh scams. The same for property-after the heated up bubble burst in the late 1990s. That is the natural order of things.

We have not yet gone through that cycle as far as art is concerned. This is the first time prices have risen, pushed by several factors - a mixture of rising incomes, rich NRIs and good, old fashioned hype. With blanket media coverage, the high net worth individual starts thinking he is being left behind the latest trend and the dealer steps in to fill that need.

But like all markets, this too needs a secondary market and an ever increasing pool of buyers; plus there should be a continuous flow of quality goods. All three are missing for the moment. The blue-chip masters will always be good investments and besides, will bring joy in other ways. But five years from now, who will buy that kitsch on your wall you paid 50 lakh rupees for?

Email: sidharth01@dnaindia.net