Chair

Kathryn Brown (Loughborough University)

Panellists

Chandrika Acharya (Heidelberg University), Kathryn Brown (Loughborough University), Shatavisha Mustafi (UPES, Dehradun)

Gavels and Gigabytes: Local Auction markets in the dot com age

Chandrika Acharya (Heidelberg University)

The first Indian auction houses came into being in the final years of the dotcom boom. The 2000s were typified by new models of entrepreneurship, an appetite for risk-taking and a changing view of the economy powered by venture capitalism, software, and the internet. This paper looks at the emergence of the auction house Saffronart at the intersection of technological innovation, economic reforms and the “global turn” in art history, when the international art market and exhibition circuits revised their curatorial programs to include artists beyond the Eurocentric framework. Founded in 2000 by the husband-wife duo Dinesh and Minal Vazirani, the startup Saffronart chose a model of online auctions which was relatively new for the nascent Indian art market that had only been in existence for a decade. Comparing the model to a two-day video game, the founder of the company Minal Vazirani noted the similarity of their auction formats to ecommerce sites such as Ebay and their focus on the rising demography of technologically affluent buyers. The strategy of remote bidding allowed them to build a network that could equally attract the Non-Resident Indian diaspora and the resident Indian.

While a click and bricks auction house which holds its operations through online sales is an established practice now, particularly with the rise of the Covid-19 pandemic, the case study of Saffronart reveals how the emergence of e-commerce, email, and the World Wide Web in the early 2000s was integrated into the Indian art market. Parallelly, my paper will also discuss how the rise of Saffronart marks the entry of Indian auction houses into a market, which was previously dominated by global giants such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s. The paper will reflect upon the points of departure brought in by a local auction house with global operations as noted in the format, branding exercises, and the marketing discourse. The presentation will particularly focus on Saffronart's development of online auction catalogues, which built a discourse on the Indian artists' historical significance within the broader context of 20th-century art practices, highlighting them as crucial albeit understudied and hence undervalued artists. My paper will open a discussion on the interplay between the tech boom and the dynamics of the Indian art market, and the pivotal role played by local auction houses during this transformative period.

Playing by the rules: Auctions as devices for expanding art markets

Kathryn Brown (Loughborough University)

Art auctions are rules-based events that follow sales procedures made clear to their organizers, participants, and spectators. This feature of auctions means that they are easily transferable across cultures and geographies. Indeed, auction houses – particularly those capable of operating at scale – are often seen to open new markets and, in some cases, establish new art categories through the expansion of their businesses. If auctions stage public events that conform to a fixed set of rules, might they function as devices that impose economic order on art worlds and thereby contribute to the building of cultural infrastructures? Can global business interests effectively map onto and meet specific regional needs? Do auctions successfully attract international collectors to lesser-known art worlds and art genres? Answering these questions entails thinking about the opportunities and tensions that arise when art auctions function as both global networking devices and events with local cultural significance. By examining and comparing examples of art auction activity in a range of countries, this paper explores synergies and problems attaching to market expansion.

For Sale, Modern Indian Art: Revisiting the early auction history and the formation of Modern Indian Art as a market category

Shatavisha Mustafi (UPES, Dehradun)

The last decade of the 20th Century played a crucial role in the subcontinent of India with the introduction of several legislative bills to usher in economic reforms focusing on liberalisation, privatisation, and globalisation (LPG). These reforms were to become dominant factors for the reshaping of the artworld and the subsequent commodification of artworks and the quick turnover through the auction route. For culture elites, art acquired the status of symbolic good and store of value. This resulted in the rise of new networks of economic transactions, which further resulted in the new kinds of value making in the artworld.

The first ever “Indian” artwork that went under the hammer was sold at a Sothebys’ auction in 1965. This artwork was by the modernist from the Progressive Artists Group, FN Souza (1924-2002). But a closer look at the auction details will inform that the concerned artwork was not part of “Indian art” as a category. Subsequently, the next auction of Indian art took place in 1987, this auction was conducted by the Christie’s in Bombay. The following year, the Times of India celebrated its 150th anniversary by exhibiting its art collection and the Sothebys’ auctioned a part of same. The consequence of LPG resulted in the Christie’s opening its branch in Bombay in 1994 and a year later in 1995, the first auction of “Indian art” was held by the same auction house in London, while in New York, Sotheby’s auctioned and introduced a new category, “Modern Indian art”. Though the events set a measure of the value of Indian art at a global level, a close analysis of subsequent developments reveal that the next focused sale of art form the same category happened only in 2003.  These series of events hint that though the auction houses opened branches in India, they, most likely found it challenging to capitalize on this particular category of Modern Indian art.

In the early 1990s, art historian and critics re-conceptualised twentieth century Indian art as “modernist”, claiming that its previous denigration as provincial or derivative (of Western art) fell within a narrow ethnocentric vision of artistic modernism as framed by primarily western art historian. On the contrary, they theorized, the works were the product of Indian modernism, a unique style expressing the modern Indian identity through the use of traditional visual themes and international aesthetic influences. Alongside the 1994 seminal exhibition titled, “100 Years of Indian Art” which was enshrined at the National Museum, which showcased the several transitions in Indian art, this exhibition also resulted in co-defining Indian modernism, a category, which in turn was picked by the auction houses to outline a category. The intermittent timeline of the early auction history of Modern Indian art makes an interesting multilayered study which focuses on the catagorisation of Indian art alongside its multifaceted aspects of valuation that includes, the economic, cultural, and historical.