Islamic art's dwindling trove of relics
By Shanthy Nambiar and Matthew Brown Bloomberg News
Published: July 3, 2007
BANGKOK: Nasser David Khalili, catapulted into the top five of Britain's rich list by the soaring value of his Islamic art, said that the jump in prices for old works by Muslim artists has barely begun.
"Anyone who says Islamic art is expensive is dreaming," said Khalili, an Iranian-born Jewish collector. "The Muslim world is not short of money, but the world is short of objects. This is only the beginning."
Governments and millionaires in nations from Saudi Arabia to Malaysia, enriched by a doubling of crude oil prices in four years, are bidding for a dwindling supply of surviving artifacts from 1,400 years of Islamic culture. Khalili said that his seven-century-old "Jami al-Tawarikh," one of the world's earliest histories, is now worth 15 to 20 times the $12 million he paid for it in 1990.
"Islamic art is still underappreciated and undervalued compared to other areas of the art market," said Edward Gibbs, the head of Islamic and Indian Art at Sotheby's, the world's second-largest auction house. "The booming economies of the Middle East and the wealth created have fueled interest."
Khalili has amassed more than 20,000 Islamic works spanning 1,400 years since he started buying in the 1970s, making his probably the world's biggest private collection. An exhibition of more than 350 of the pieces opened on June 22 in Sydney's Art Gallery of New South Wales.
The owner of London-based real estate company Favermead was worth £5.8 billion, or $11.4 billion, according to the 2007 Sunday Times' Rich List. He jumped 94 places from last year to No. 5. The value of his art was estimated at £4.5 billion, compared with £500 million a year ago, according to Art Newspaper, which said that the new valuation may be too high.
Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and private buyers are vying to preserve their heritage and bolster museum collections. The Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar is scheduled to open by the end of the year. The emirate of Abu Dhabi plans to spend €400 million, or $541.5 million, over 10 years building a collection to be included in a complex that will house branches of the Guggenheim and the Louvre.
Private Muslim collectors should "buy back your culture now before it's too expensive," said Charles Pocock, managing partner at Dubai's Meem Gallery.
Still, the market for Islamic art remains a fraction of that for Western art. Sotheby's sold about $8.8 million of Islamic art at its London auction in April, almost a quarter more than the presale estimate. Christie's International auctioned $7.8 million in Islamic and Indian works the same month in London. The two biggest auction houses sold $1.44 billion of art, mostly Western works, at their spring sales in New York the following month.
The small size of the Islamic art market means that a handful of major collectors have a big influence on prices.
"The very top end of the market is the domain of a very small number of people," said William Robinson, director of Christie's Islamic art department in London.
The market fell in 2005 after Qatar's Sheikh Saud Muhammad al-Thani, a member of the ruling family, was investigated for alleged misuse of public funds in connection with his purchases for Qatar museums. He was removed as chairman of the National Council for Culture, Arts and Heritage. He was later pardoned, London-based Art Newspaper reported in April.
Saud bought a Mughal agate-and-garnet fly-whisk handle in April 2004 for £901,250, 113 times its £8,000 estimate, the paper said.
"When one big buyer like that goes missing, it is going to upset the market quite a lot," said Lucien de Guise, who is the acting head curator of the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur. "Because there are other museums developing collections, the market has bounced back."
Sotheby's sales of Islamic art in London more than doubled to £8.3 million in 2006, from £3.68 million in 2002, Gibbs said. A smaller rival, Bonhams, which is London's third-largest auction house, plans to hold its first sale in Dubai in November.
Islamic art typically includes religious and secular items between the 7th and 19th centuries from countries like Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan and India. It offers pages from the Koran, Arabic calligraphy and manuscripts, ceramics and vessels from Spain and Turkey and rainbow-hued miniature paintings from Iran.
"Anything that is made mainly by Muslims for Muslims, especially in a sacred setting like a mosque, would have to count as Islamic art," de Guise said. "At the top of the hierarchy will be the Koran and other written religious works."
Opened in 1998 and housed under turquoise and gold domes, Kuala Lumpur's Islamic Arts Museum has 8,000 objects, including vases from China, jewelry from India and Indonesian textiles.
Personal wealth in the Middle East is expected to rise to $2.2 trillion by 2011 from $1.4 trillion in 2006, Merrill Lynch and Capgemini reported in a 2007 world wealth report. The number of U.S.-dollar millionaires in the region rose 11.9 percent to more than 300,000 last year, the report said.
"The auction houses can't find things to sell," Khalili said. "Ten to 20 years ago, their catalogue had 200 to 300 objects, where 10 or 15 pieces were considered to be important enough for international exhibitions or museums. Now you may find one or two pieces, and there are 25 or 30 clients."
Works that do come up for sale return to the market rarely as most museums and buyers are building permanent collections.
"Very few of the people buying are doing it for investment," De Guise said. "It has got to do with personal aesthetic and cultural pride."
One example is the Dubai-based billionaire Mishal Kanoo, whose collection includes calligraphy.
"I can't bring myself to ever sell," said Kanoo, the vice chairman of Kanoo Group, a shipping-to-chemicals conglomerate. "It is something specific to do with my culture."
Khalili also plans to keep his collection together.
"I haven't spent the best part of my life working 18 to 20 hours a day to put together this collection to one day disperse it," he said. "It will be housed under one roof, intact."