However, because of the unprofessional nature of the market in India, it is not only good art, but generally bad art, a wide range that includes copies, strongly derivative and decorative works, and even amateur rubbish, that isalso being exhibited by galleries nowadays. It is this that creates the glut and the so-called recession of which gallery owners have begun to complain.

Anyone who can hold a paint-brush becomes an artist. The works are sold through official patronage, pulling strings or by any other means. Such sales do not represent sales of art-works. They reflect good sales technique, and often enough, arm-twisting. This is especially true of artists who are bureaucrats' wives and the like, who manage to get their art bought by official bodies.

Or there are owners of big commercial houses with a desire to be known as patrons, who buy the works of sycophants, of whom there is no dearth in the art world. Needless to say, art bought as a result of such public relations exercises has absolutely no resale value. As a result, gullible collectors who have invested in it find themselves high and dry, get disheartened and stop collecting.

What is worse, a number of galleries too get reduced into selling such works. Some ofthem even go so far as to call them ``bread and butter'' sales to interior decorators, hoteliers and the like. Such buyers, of course, are not interested in the secondary market for these works and they are probably dumped on the trash can like the day before's newspapers after a while. But such sales keep bad art in production. This in turn feeds the recession mentality in the art world, something that would otherwise have escaped its worst effects.

Can we salvage the situation? Yes, if gallery-owners pursue a strict policy of exhibiting only and good and relevant art. The buyers are already practising such a policy. The study of recent auctions and sales shows this trend among buyers. They no longer even spare the saleable artists when they flood the market with hurriedly produced works. That is why some works by the same artist over-shoot the top end of the expected price while others remain unsold. On this basis, much of the art produced by hackneyed or bad artists would be pushed out of the market,creating the healthy atmosphere that got contemporary Indian art onto the world stage in the first place.

In an exercise like this, one cannot avoid naming names. The Shantiniketan artists still top the list with artists like Nandalal Bose, Benode Bihari Mukherjee and Ram Kinkar Baij, as hardy perennials. Then there are the two Tagores, Rabindranath and Gaganendranath. Of the former progressive artists of Mumbai, M F Husain and F N Souza, head the list. Individuals like Sailoz Mookerjee, Anjolie Ela Menon, Jamini Roy and Ganesh Pyne, along with the artists of the groups mentioned above, command prices close to or above Rs 2 lakh. They constitute, today, the safest buys in the art world for whom a secondary market is always available.

Among the second rank, sculptors Somenath Hore, Himmat Shah and Nagji Patel, painters Ram Kumar, Arpana Caur, K G Subramanyan, Jehangir Sabavala and Akbar Padamsee and avant-garde artist Vivan Sundaram, could be considered safe bets for the future. Obviously, the listis not exhaustive. It only gives us an idea of what kind of art sells easily between Rs 50,000 and Rs 2 lakh, in general.

Among the young, sculptor Atul Sinha has done well at his recent show, while painter Neeraj Bakshi for the first time sold one of his works for a five-figure price in Nairobi. Similarly, the graphics of Sukhvinder Singh, now exhibiting in Yokohoma Museum, are well over ten times the price they sold at in India. Other artists of promise among the young are Neeraj Goswami, Paresh Maity, Probir Gupta, Chittrovanu Mazumdar, Debabratta De, K S Radhakrishnan, Manisha Parekh, Mekhlla, Rahul Arya, Mohan Ram, Natraj Sharma and Valsan Kalleri, to name only a few. The art scene is still alive and well. It must be kept that way with judicious buying.