With 78% of the lots sold and and the Rabindranath Tagore’s works making £1.6m, there were solid sales by Raza, Souza, Manjit Banwa and Chandra.
Indian Art Fair Spawns Another
The Indian Art Summit has created a second art fair in the country just by moving it’s date:
After two years of being held in August, the organisers of India Art Summit decided to shift the annual event to January leading to a no show in 2010. But the Capital’s art circles will not be deprived of an art extravaganza in this calender year. Another art event, the India International Art Fair, will make its debut in autumn. Interestingly, it was the postponement of the Summit that led to the plans for the art fair. Continue Reading
Why Indian Elite Love England
Recently, the Telegraph tried to get to the bottom of why so many wealthy Indians were buying homes (and art) in the UK. Christening them the Bollygarchs, Clive Aslet describes the appeal:
Although India is moving very fast in economic terms, entrepreneurs do not yet have access to sophisticated capital markets, such as those in London – and if you have a lot of money, it is nice to be near it.
Over the past couple of years, it is Indians who have made the market for homes costing over £10m. In this, the newcomers have followed the lead of Lakshmi Mittal, who bought a town palace in Kensington Park Gardens for £70m in 2003. The suave and immaculate Cyrus Vandrevala, a technology investor in his 30s, who started Intrepid Capital Partners, lived at Claridge’s for six months with his heiress wife Priya before buying somewhere for £20m at the end of 2008.
“The wealthy Indian community are not highly leveraged and are therefore in a perfect position to buy property at a hugely discounted rate,” he has said.Continue Reading
Prosperity Threatens the Arts in India
In the New York Times, Akash Kapur explores the conflict in Indian culture that is drawing students and money away from the arts in favor of technology. It’s easy to understand the appeal. Young people want to succeed and the energy in India’s economy is in the tech sector:
As India grows richer, its culture is changing. The question is whether that culture will be defined solely by the nation’s new prosperity — whether a nation in the midst of a consumerist frenzy can maintain noncommercial islands of intellectual and cultural endeavor, and whether a population determined to get rich can appreciate pursuits whose returns are less immediately tangible.Continue Reading
Indian Homes Have $1B in Old Art
Kishore Singh has lunch with Neville Tuli of Osian’s in India. They discuss the market for Indian antiquities which has government constraints. Singh claims to have more than $200 million worth of art and memorabilia that the company owns itself:
There’s nothing that angers him as much as accusations about the health of the organisation. “Osian’s,” he glowers into his plate, “has one of the largest collections in the world, of 265,000 original art works and memorabilia owned by us. It’s worth Rs 800-1,000 crore. It’s because of that we have been able to do what we have done, and we’ve sold barely 2,000 works from that collection (at auctions, to fund our ventures).”
Tuli also estimates the Indian antiquities held in the country at $1 billion in value. More important, he feels there is far more outside of the country. As India’s wealth grows, the desire to repatriate that patrimony should grow too:Continue Reading