databeautiful

The index for Indian Art is published by Economic Times (Bombay). “The ET Art Index is based on average Square Inch Rate (SIR) of works of art of India’s top 51 artists. Weights for liguidity and historical significance of each artist have been considered to arrive at index values. The index was developed keeping in mind the growing interest in Indian contemporary at across the globe and the need to track its perforance vis-a-vis other asset classes like equities, gold, and real estate.”

“The year 1997 has been taken as the base year for the purpose of calculating the base values. This year was a turning point in the history of the Indian Contemporary Art, according to experts, in which, among other issues, the first professional auction was held by an Indian organisation, HEART. The base value has been converted into 100 to obtain the index figures.

On a Compounded Annualized Growth (CAGR) basis, ET Art Index gave a return of 47.8% since it’s inception in Jan 01, 1998. From a level of 100 on Dec 31, 1997 the index value stood at 2513.1 on March 22, 2006. During the same period, BSE Sensex gave a return of 14% on a CAGR basis. The significant movement of the ET Art Index started in the year 2003, which was also the beginning of the boom period for the Indian equity market.”

Yamini Mehta, the head of Modern and Contemporary Indian Art for Christie’s in New York.

From an article in ECONOMIC TIMES (Bombay),
1 Oct, 2008, 1230 hrs IST, IANS:

“KOLKATA: Till five years ago, Indian artists shared space with their western counterparts in shows abroad to lend prestige to their portfolios. Today, artists from the West are finding it commercially viable to work and exhibit their canvases in India in a reversal of the trend.”

Continued

Tyeb Mehta’s “Mahisasura” sold at Christie’s auction in London in September 2005 for USD $1.6 million.

Siggraph 2008 Los Angeles - expo floor

Energy, money, and cultural innovation has been gradually moving from the West to Asia - a shift which manifests itself in a variety of ways. Not everything is as dramatic as Olympics 2008 opening - sometimes we can see this shift revealing itself in details.

Take SIGGRAPH, an annual trade show, conference and a festival for 3D computer graphics and animation technology. In 2007 edition (San Diego) I noticed a significant increase in the numbers of visitors from Asia - which was understandable given the fact that China, Thailand, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and other Asian countries have been investing considerably in building creative industries in their countries, in addition to being an “animation factory” for Hollywood.

I saw the same trend at SIGGRAPH 2008 which is taking place in Los Angeles this week. Add to this that beginning this year, there will be a new convention SIGGRAPH.ASIA (which will take place in Singapore in December). But here is the list detail which I found very telling. At the trade show many companies run non-stop demos of their software or hardware. A typical demo may last 30 min and will involve somebody demonstrating some application features, or digital designers explaining how they used the software in some latest production.

At the large INTEL booth, I noticed that each day last 2 hours of the shows were in Japanese and Korean - without any English translation. Here was a major conference in US geared first of all at US visitors - and yet it now added sessions for non-speaking Asian visitors. Interesting..