Osian's Auction Catalogue India The Passionate Detachment | February 2001

13 Redefining the Institution of Art Auctions Osian’s is intended to help build a merit-conscious & financially self-sufficient infrastructure for the arts in India, while placing creativity at the heart of this institution- building process. From this platform new roles for the intelligentsia, artistic culture and charity will emerge within the developmental processes of India. As a result the scope and duty of creativity will redefine itself. Thereafter the chance of dissolving many socio-economic inequities through the arts will seem more practical to our people. Only upon fulfilling such domestic efforts can a new universal inspiration be derived from the daily thought and practice of Indian creativity. To this end the institutional framework of Osian’s will integrate three overlapping areas of knowledge and expertise: the Aesthetic, the Educational & the Corporate. The ethos we plan to institutionalize is one rooted in introspection, experiment and risk-taking, hand in hand with a will dedicated to creating and redistributing wealth for the arts. The nature of the task ahead will throw up many practical dilemmas. For example, the mechanisms by which the aesthetic, scholarly and compassionate handle wealth with detachment and credibility; the manner by which the exclusive is harnessed so as to serve an egalitarianism; the manner by which private gain will nurture public service, transparency and accountability; the manner in which individual originality is prevented from compromising to popular mediocrity. Without tackling such seeming contradictions, no long-term institutional success is possible. Further, the success of Osian’s will be judged on how it helps to create and deepen an ethos for a highly refined aesthetic and art-historical sensibility within India. This also implies nurturing artistic creativity & aesthetics as an integral part of the contemporary lifestyle, and the issue regarding art being a secure individual and collective investment. Only with this foundation can artistic culture hope to play a pivotal role on its own terms, in India’s socio-economic development process. Thus a key role for Osian’s is to show that the Indian arts can independently generate wealth and simultaneously redistribute it so as to take forward the cultural & educational infrastructure-building process. This will be no easy task, but it is the responsibility of the private sector to take up this challenge more than ever. New rules and institutions will have to be created, changing the concepts and duty of creativity, scholarship and patronage. In this context a national Art Auction House becomes the ideal vehicle for change. However, the Art Auction House as it is understood today needs to be redefined, merging its vision and services into a new holistic institution. The success of this redefinition will depend upon how the institution tackles the following issues: — The extent and manner by which generation and redistribution of wealth is affected by art auctions and a domestic auction house. — The structures required so as to re-emphasise the motivation of an auction house from serving commercial priorities to a wider infrastructure-building process, while maintaining its professionalism at international standards. — The manner in which a research and documentation process is to be in-built and disseminated through auctions and its institution. — Curated auctions already demand a clear unity between the aesthetic, intellectual and financial frameworks. Can such auctions be sustained on the scale and at the pace required so as to establish a full-fledged auction house? — How to harness the advantages of curated art auctions in establishing standards of aesthetic discrimination and deeper links between critical-historical narratives and contemporary pricing? — The manner in which auctions can mould the involvement of the government and corporate sectors so as to play a more progressive and positive role in transforming infrastructure bottlenecks. — The extent it can inspire the international community to get involved with appreciating and preserving Indian cultural heritage and nurturing new and more radical exchanges of thought and culture. — The degree to which auctions can change attitudes regarding financial transparency, thereby leading to deeper changes regarding public accountability. A key component of a successful art auction house in India is going to be the curated auction. However, to serve its function the curated auction needs to be credible at various levels. This implies it must tackle the following issues effectively: — The auction must be able to bring together a collection of rare and high quality works of art. The majority of these works must not be accessible through the normal gallery and dealer networks. — This rarity and quality must be clearly perceived by the public, and the underlying financial system must exist for fairly valuing these intangibles over time. For example, if ’quality’ is influenced by an attached and relevant critical- historical narrative to the work of art, among other factors,