| An art auction at Saffronart's Mumbai gallery is almost surreal. The walls display some wonderful and expensive art, but there is no excited crowd of bidders present-only a few stray buyers glued to their computer screens-nor is there an auctioneer making those inane-yet-persuasive remarks about the lots coming up for sale. Yet the live display on the large Sony screen is constantly flickering, updating bids placed by 450-odd invisible buyers spread over 23 countries. Over a staggered two-day-long online auction, India's first and most highly regarded virtual auction house last week sold 146 lots, grossing Rs 56 crore. Fifteen paintings crossed the Rs 1-crore figure, with four of them selling for over Rs 2.5 crore and the F.N. Souza landscape touching Rs 3 crore. So what does that say about buying trends in the art mart? Dinesh Vazirani, 39, the man behind Saffronart, offers some interesting statistics, "Thirty-five per cent of the bidders were new to us and 32 per cent of them ended up buying. Not all were of Indian origin as we had winning bids from one European collector, two Korean and two Chinese buyers too." The community of Indian art collectors who buy expensive art works over the Net, it seems, is constantly growing. "And this despite the fact that we subject all potential bidders to a rather complicated process of identity and fiscal authentication," adds Vazirani, who studied engineering at Stanford and management at the Harvard Business School. Vazirani and his INSEAD-trained wife Minal started Planetsaffron.com, an e-commerce Website for alternative lifestyle, after getting a million-dollar start from Chrysalis Ventures. "But the portfolio of products was too diverse and the returns very small, so we suffered huge losses," recalls Vazirani. It was then that Vazirani, a passionate art collector himself, hit upon the idea of a Web-based art auction house. He realised that with growing fiscal clout, NRI and Indian buyers were turning into serious collectors but were too busy and too dispersed to be able to visit art galleries and auction houses personally. The result was saffronart.com, a specialised Web-based art auction house that is now making waves not only in India but also abroad. "Even Christie's has not gone online with auctions as yet, and though there are many e-commerce Websites, none has the credibility in the art world that Dinesh has," says Chennai-based gallerist Sharan Apparao, who is all set to go online herself. "With a new Net-savvy but widely spread client base, the art business just had to go online," says Vazirani. Index
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