In the West, the link between art and money has been intimate and longstanding. In India, this relationship is recent and newfangled. Sotheby's baptised the Indian art market in 1995 with two sales from the Chester and Davida Herwitz collection. M F Husain, Jamini Roy, Anjolie Ela Menon, Ganesh Pyne and other artists slugged it out in the sale rooms. Both the sales produced astonishing prices that may have made even some bankers dizzy. This was the beginning for the Indian art market -- to start attracting attention at all levels, popular and serious, for artist's names and their sale prices to become household words in smart Indian homes, for the press to start devoting morecolumn inches to art, for the works of living artists to be traded in their lifetime and for the debut of a new breed of collectors and dealers, more speculators rather than true art lovers. The price of contemporary Indian art became fascinating and for some the speculative benefits, enticing. Encouraged by this initial success Sotheby's followed by Christie's have held annual sales in London and New York giving us the impression that the world market for Indian contemporary art is a huge entity and is growing at a phenomenal rate with an ever increasing number of collectors willing to pay large sums of money for a relatively fixed supply of good works.

The truth is that the hype surrounding the Herwitz sales made them social events where the herd instinct dragged the prices out of kilter, so that value and price became for the first time divorced. Today, none of these prices have sustained. The variety of painters achieving top prices has shrunk, with only a few works continuing to do well in realfinancial terms.

Then why this buzz about art as an investment? One answer is that if some person's experience of the short term, when the risk is at its lowest and the gain at its highest, is successful it confirms the notion that art is a good investment. This suffices to keep people buying.

The investment potential of art has been studied at different times in the last two decades, by three groups of people Gerald Rutlinger, Robin Duthy and William Baumol. The salient features of all three conclusions are that art as investment has never shown that it outperforms either the stock markets or inflation and that rarely does it do better than conventional investments. Only very rare and important works of art continue to do well, and below that level it is not a good investment. To portray the art market as similar to other markets, that is, over the long run steady and predictable is misplaced. It may be unpopular to say so, but the art market is not a rational market but only a speculative one, withlosses and gains and whole areas where real prices fall.

We should also not forget that the art world has cyclical aspects. All artists whose works were bought in the past may not be worth selling now and very many painters get left out of the reckoning. Also lets consider that if painters flourish during their lifetime it is obviously harder for their pictures to increase in superabundant value, if only because their prices started from higher levels. On the other hand the work of painters who are unsuccessful in their lifetime may become precious after their death. Here are the words of Eugene Thaw: "The hottest of all art market commodities today, as always in the past, are the big names of contemporary art. Common sense must warn us, therefore that soon others will become the big names, with only a small fraction of today's high flyers surviving at all and only a fraction of that fraction surviving with increased value."

I can put it no better.

Czaee Shah is an art collector