A shortcut to buy good art cheap

Innovative ideas are helping to bridge the gap between rarefied art and the common man. It''s a technique involving the effective merging of art with commerce. I tried it out four years ago when I had to bring out the silver jubilee issue of a popular film magazine. Now we know that film stars are highly saleable. The idea was to make the refined world of art equally so.Instead of using the usual flashy blow-ups, we asked a famous artist if he would present each section of the issue with a thematic painting. Though busy with an international exhibition, Yusuf Arakkal got hooked on the idea, and came out with 12 masterpieces that made the issue not just a star-studded success, but a collector''s delight. Line drawings and charcoal sketches, whose originals would have cost at least Rs 1.5 lakh each, were available for the price of the magazine (Rs 200). While big-time art collectors may scoff at the idea, it was wonderful for beginners. Extract the page from the journal, get it framed and mounted, and you had the genius of Yusuf Arakkal on your walls. Another time, the story of how Jaya Bachchan succeeded in keeping her marriage intact was presented not with pin-ups but with the masterpiece of Jaya, done by Sameer Mondal. Recently, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, creator of the Biocon India Group, tried something similar with Ale & Arty (Penguin India). The book tells the story of beer through anecdotal history, alongside brilliant commissioned illustrations by well-known artists, including Jatin Das, Yusuf Arakkal, S G Vasudev, Archie Forrest, James Fullarton, George Devlin, Anuradha Nalapat and Gurudas Shenoy. Imagine the double impact: On one side you learn some curious facts about the origin of certain household phrases - ''honeymoon'', for instance - while the facing page has a renaissance-style painting of an Austrian-looking couple, by maestro R Bhaskaran. Likewise, the migratory route taken by beer from Mesopotamia to Europe is brought alive by Anuradha Nalapats superb, old-Egyptian style painting. For Rs 895, the book is a steal and a collector''s coup. The smart investor has realised it; he gets miniature reproductions of works costing at least Rs 20 lakh, at a fraction of the price.