Prices soar for modern Pakistani art
At a newly established art gallery in Pakistan's southern city of Karachi curious visitors sneak inside - hours before the formal opening of an art show.

They are looking for paintings by Mansoor Aye, who died earlier this year, or by the elderly and frail Tasadduq Sohail.
In Pakistan's increasingly speculative art market, posthumous sales of better known painters can bring windfall profits.
But even these early birds at the Ocean gallery are disappointed.
Like most art exhibitions around the country these days, nearly all the paintings carry red tags - meaning they are sold.

Pakistan's art market has gone crazy over the past year, with prices multiplying 10 to 20 times over. And famous artists are not the only beneficiaries.

In the nearby Unicorn gallery, a fresh art school graduate declines an attempt by a collector to reduce the price of her oil-on-canvas portrait of a woman from $580 to $450.
This is in sharp contrast to veteran painter Tasadduq Sohail who hardly received more than $50 for a painting until he was 65.

But then in 2006, one of his works was sold for $32,000 at an international auction.
"It is not easy to haggle with young artists these days, they know they will find buyers," says Seemah Niaz, the curator at Unicorn.
"They don't even have to display their work at the galleries, because buyers often visit their studios to make deals," she says.
Major buyers often do not even find it necessary to look at what they are buying.

So why such an indiscriminate rush now for modern Pakistani art?
One reason is that the traditional art collector has been replaced by speculators from the corporate sector.

"Many investors in the stock market and real estate sectors have realised that investment in art is comparatively more reliable and secure," says Zohra Hussain, the owner of Karachi's oldest gallery, Chawkandi Art.

"What's more, liberal bank credits and low interest rates during the last few years have enabled people to shovel larger amounts of money into art."
All this when recently the Pakistani economy was growing at over 8% a year.

"The trend started in the West, and the oil-rich Arab sheikhdoms took a fancy to it," says journalist and veteran art critic Akbar Naqvi.

"Since the Arabs did not have a model of their own, they started extending patronage to artists in Iran and South Asia to decorate their galleries."
An equal interest in South Asian art by Indian and Pakistani expatriate communities in the West created incentives for major Western auction houses to start offering South Asian art at their sales.

Some of these auction houses, like Sotheby's, Christie's and Bonhams, have extended their operations to Dubai in the last few years.

The boom for Indian art arrived much earlier than that for Pakistani art and some works of Indian masters have fetched nearly $500,000 at recent international auctions.
Works of Pakistani masters are now following suit. A lapis lazuli mosaic in metal by Ismail Gulgee was sold for $336,000 at Bonhams' Dubai auction in March.
"Auction sales do not reflect the actual worth of an artist, but they do place him in a certain price slot so that people are willing to pay corresponding prices for his or her subsequent works," says Zohra Hussain.

In other words, the net worth of today's artist is based on his or her economic viability rather than aesthetic credibility.
"A great artist is the one who sells, it is a simple theory of supply and demand," says Mansoor Halim, an art collector and executive vice president of ACE Securities business firm.