Buying before the museum arrives

Deciding before the system

Access as a condition. Operating before institutional validation is a method applied by Art Consulting in several international contexts. India offers a verifiable demonstration. In the mid-2000s the international art system was beginning to look towards India. Western galleries were opening spaces, auction houses were recording the first significant results, some European institutions were beginning to research and acquire. International museum validation had not yet taken place. But the point was not to be in India: it was to have direct access before the system. Art Consulting had direct relationships with the artists: not commercial intermediaries, not gallery filters, but personal relationships built over time. This made it possible to enter studios before the works entered the circuit, to see work in progress, to engage in direct dialogue about work not yet exhibited and not yet promised. Galleries remained necessary interlocutors, but the decision took place in the studio.
Without this, arriving earlier would have had no value. With this access, time became a decisional variable: buying before the system closed around a name.

The decision before validation. The work with collectors in New Delhi and Mumbai followed a precise sequence. First a visit to the galleries, out of respect for the system and for the commercial relationships of the artists. Then together into the studios, where the real choice took place. The collectors were present at every moment: in the studios, in the negotiations, in the choices. Not as guided buyers, but as protagonists of a shared process. In the studio the work was often still in progress, unpublished and not yet promised: certainly available. It is at this moment that the decision has value: not when the name is already a certainty, but when judgment must replace guarantee.
In 2010, while the Centre Pompidou was preparing the exhibition Paris-Delhi-Bombay, conversations with curators, gallerists and artists returned a precise picture of which works and which names were entering the curatorial selection. Not official information: direct reading of the system through relationships built over time. The works were therefore acquired months before their official inclusion in the exhibition and before publication. It was not a speculation; it was an autonomous critical judgment, verified by proximity to the system and direct knowledge of the artists. An experience that the collectors lived in person. And the collectors were there when it happened.

Paris, 2011. The works acquired months earlier by the collectors in the studios of New Delhi and Mumbai were exhibited at the Paris-Delhi-Bombay exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, one of the first major exhibitions on contemporary Indian art (25 May – 19 September 2011), and published in the official catalogue. Among them: works by Jitish Kallat, Bharti Kher, Shilpa Gupta, Reena Saini Kallat, Sudarshan Shetty, Riyas Komu, Mithu Sen, Tukral & Tagra, Sunil Gawde, Sakshi Gupta. The collectors were present alongside the artists at the inauguration, and the rooms of the Centre Pompidou were the occasion of the encounter between the collectors and their works hanging on the walls of the museum. Only after the exhibition did they enter the private collections. The validation came afterwards; the choice had come before.