Q&A: Saffronart’s Spring Auction

By Margherita Stancati

Starting Wednesday morning, around 1,200 people are expected to log on to the website for the Mumbai-based fine-art auction house Saffronart for their spring online auction of over 100 works.

Organizers say they expect sales ranging from almost half a million to as low as $1,000, with S.H. Raza’s “Tanava” (1922) topping the range and Anandajit Ray’s “Untitled,” a set of two, towards the other end of it.

The 57 Indian artists whose works are on offer include many of the usual suspects, from the near-centenarian  painter M.F. Husain, to the more recent art star Subodh Gupta , a painter and sculptor, to Arpita Singh, whose painting “Wish Dream” fetched a record-breaking $2.2 million at Saffronart’s winter auction in December.

Sales at Saffronart jumped to around $25 million in 2010 from less than half that figure a year earlier, a bad time for art sales because of the global economic downturn. Organizers expect sales from the next two days to touch between $5 to $6 million. India Real Time spoke to Saffronart CEO and co-founder Dinesh Vaziran ahead of the auction. Edited excerpts:

IRT: Who buys art online?

Mr. Vaziran: People often feel more comfortable with the anonymity of buying online. There can be hesitation if you have to walk in a Christie’s or Sotheby’s room. The Internet removes that intimidation.

There are top-end collectors who have been buying art for years and who are looking for specific works that fit into their collection. Then there are those who do their bidding only online. They are younger collectors who are looking for good artists and tend to buy in the $2,000-3,000 range. That market is growing quite substantially and very fast; now the [newcomers and the long-time collectors] are roughly half and half.

IRT: Last year you launched a mobile application for bidding. How is that going?

Mr. Vaziran: It’s amazing how mobiles have become an instrument of transaction. Last year someone bought a painting by Husain for around $250,000. We spoke to the person afterwards about having just made a quarter-of-a-million-dollar purchase on their phone. They said they were bidding from a hospital in Singapore. Mobile bidding, thanks to the easy access it provides, is the way of the future.

IRT: What have been the major changes in the Indian art market over the past year?

Mr. Vaziran: There’s been a consolidation of the market, which has focused on private-sector [art] infrastructure building. Established collectors saw that there was no public sector support in the arts and stepped in themselves. A lot of wealthy Indians are moving to build infrastructure in their own communities, like Rajshree Pathy who set up Contemplate Art Gallery [in Coimbatore]. This is a big mindset change that happened in 2010.

IRT: How would you respond to the criticism that we heard in relation to a recent art show, that the ‘Indianness’ of Indian art sometimes takes precedence over its artistic merit?

Mr. Vaziran: This implies there is a tradeoff between Indianness and artistic merit—but Indianness, drawing from Indian folk art and symbols, actually gives it artistic merit. Indian art often has some elements of it being Indian but also a global appeal—getting the balance right is very hard.

The auction opens on Wednesday at 9 a.m. IST and ends Thursday at 9:30 pm.