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New millennium art is big small business

Priya Srinivasan in Bombay

There was a time when art-lovers had to be content with gazing at the latest offering of their favourite artist at the local gallery. Most of them could not afford to buy art -- it seemed a prohibitively priced commodity.

The scene is changing. The business of art in India is fast acquiring new dimensions.

An art-lover can now aspire to take home popular works of contemporary Indian artists for a few thousand rupees -- a fraction of the prices in the past.

If you think the economy versions are the poor pirates sold on the sly, you would be wrong. Thanks to innovative printing technology, "authentic versions" of the originals are fast gaining currency among the connoisseurs of art. What's more, it sometimes takes an expert to tell the difference!

The ultra-modern printing technology is expanding the Indian art market at a rapid pace, according to Dadibai Pundole of Pundole Art Gallery, Bombay. While prints of the originals on paper have been around for a long time, printing on canvas was not an easy proposition until recently, he says.

The technology for printing on canvas was made easy by the introduction of a high-end inkjet printer by the American company Encad in 1995. Although the technology was made available almost simultaneously in India, it is only now that it has caught the fancy of many.

"This technology eliminates about seven stages in the conventional printing process," says Pranav Parikh of Technova, a company that imports and distributes the hardware in India.

The new technology involves scanning the original art work and storing it in the form of a digital map in the computer on a special software called the Raster Image Processor. It then takes a mouse-click to activate the printer which sprays 1,440 dots per inch, a vast improvement upon the conventional 300 DPI inkjet..

Another feature of the printer is its ability to print on various media like canvas, polyester and vinyl other than paper.

While the applications of this hardware are manifold, especially in the advertising and photographic industries, (sophisticated billboards, poster prints, etc), it is in the art world that this hardware has ushered in an entirely new phenomenon -- the sale of limited editions of best-selling paintings!

Artists S H Raza and Ram Kumar have already experimented with the new technology. While Raza has recently released a limited edition of about 15 prints on canvas pricing it at Rs 7,000, Ram Kumar's prints were stocked at the Pundole Art gallery, again priced at Rs 7,000.

"I've seen the prints of Ram Kumar's work and I think they were of very good quality," remarks prominent artist Jehangir Sabavala.

But art gallery owners do ring a bell of caution, "I am only afraid that years from now, you won't be able to tell the difference between the original and the print on canvas," says Shirin Gandhi of Chemold.

"Technology is overtaking us," remarks Pundole, "but it will be a while before the print and original become indistinguishable. Besidss, these prints are not water-proof or ultra-violet-light-proof at the moment."

Sources in the art market say that at Rs 7,000, the prints are priced quite high. Not only do the prints lack investment value, there is no guarantee that the price for the same print won't drop in the future. The supply of prints will have to be studiously controlled and artists will have to ensure that prices do not drop.

This is possible, sources say, if the artists take a cue from the way the market for prints on paper has worked so far. Artist B Prabha whose prints on paper sell at about Rs 2,500, says, "So far the price of my prints has never fallen because once I make prints of a painting, I never do it again, so the supply is always limited."

While artists who release prints on paper take care not to print more than about 500 copies of a painting, authenticated copies or prints signed by the artist never exceed about 75, which ensures that these remain the collector's items and are not likely to suffer a fall in price.

This becomes doubly important in the case of prints on canvas which are priced at Rs 7,000.

Also the business of releasing prints is based on implicit faith in the printer to ensure that he does not print any more than what has been promised to the artist. This becomes important in the present context where the digital map can help to create prints whenever one chooses.

The art market, the printers say, will be shaped by the custodians of these digital maps in the days to come.

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