Deepanjana Klein is taking a novel approach to Christie’s South Asian Modern and Contemporary art sale in New York this September as part of Asia Week. The sale focuses not on the success of Indian Contemporary art but on its failures, according to Barron’s Penta:
Klein is betting that “value” collectors are now sophisticated enough to distinguish between price routs that happen because a market fairly delivered a brutal correction to an overrated artist, and a catastrophic fall in prices that came about due to external financial factors and that doesn’t have any real bearing on the underlying quality of the artists in question. “The idea is to reinvigorate all these talented artists that were forgotten since 2008,” says Klein.
For an entire year, Klein and her team scoured South Asia from Pakistan to Bangladesh, looking for contemporary artists who commanded six figures for their works before 2008, but whose prices have since been ravaged by the boom-bust of the financial crisis and South Asia’s particular meltdown. “We went back to the drawing board,” she says. The artists that Christie’s finally picked continued to be shown in major museums around the globe, even if many dealers and auctioneers had abandoned making a market in their works.
Christie’s: Lifting Fallen Angels (Barrons.com)
