On 31 December, families and friends across the world raised a glass to see in the new year, and the new decade, with hashtags like #endofanera and #newdecade trending on social media. Few could have guessed how completely those hopes for the new decade would be upended. A silent, invisible threat was already spreading, waiting to cause its havoc.
Three months into the decade, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic: the coronavirus, or COVID-19. Within days, domestic and international flights stopped, borders closed, and countries went into lockdown, with everyone confined to their homes to slow the spread of the virus. Masks, sanitisers, face shields and social distancing became the order of the day, and a new hashtag, #newnormal, began to trend. This new normal had a catastrophic and far-reaching effect on every sector of life — education, law, art, culture and the global economy among them. As stock markets fell, companies laid off staff and global brands halted production, much of daily life moved online.
The art world, long elitist and protective of its own exclusivity, had to find a way to adapt. With museums, galleries, auctions and art fairs shut or cancelled, at considerable cost, it had to plan a way through the months ahead. Even so, art continued to work as a repository of individual histories and human effort through the lockdown, offering many people some comfort as the pandemic sent the world into a tailspin. It was not a good year for the art world, though it could have been worse. Major fairs such as Asia Week New York were cancelled partway through, and sales across almost every kind of art fell by close to 50% for the year to date, against the same period in 2019. Total sales at Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips fell to $2.9 billion in 2020, from $5.7 billion over the same period the year before. Online sales, however, rose by nearly 500% over the same period, from $69 million in 2019 to $412.6 million in 2020.
This was the result of a rapid shift online across the art business. Auction houses, galleries, dealers, curators and art advisories all set up online spaces and began selling art there with some success. Museums, too, moved online: institutions such as the Tate, the National Gallery of Modern Art and the National Gallery hosted online shows that brought major works into people's living rooms. With the art world shifting to a virtual platform, the question that followed was whether this was the right time to buy art, or simply to keep collecting for its own sake, despite a struggling world economy.
Lower prices gave the newcomer a real opening to start collecting. For the buyer already familiar with the pace of the auction world, but without the time to travel to London, Paris, New York, Hong Kong, or the fairs in Venice and Basel, the shift online gave far greater access to good work at fair prices, without the time or cost of travel and hotels.
Well-known names were part of this shift — M.F. Husain, Jogen Chowdhury, Sunil Das, F.N. Souza, Paritosh Sen, and older figures such as Gopal Ghose and Jamini Roy. It is possible to buy an original work by Husain or Jogen Chowdhury for a five-figure sum, sometimes even four. Over long careers, these artists produced many drawings, etchings and unfinished works, and a careful search can still turn up something worth having for a bare corner of a room.
Vinayak Pasricha