"THE IDEA OF AN ISOLATED AMERICAN PAINTING SEEMS ABSURD TO ME, JUST AS the idea of creating a purely American mathematics or physics would seem absurd." Jackson Pollock's now famous statement was published in Arts and Architecture in 1944 and was in response to the question, "Do you think there can be a purely American art?" Pollock's reply implied that the basic concerns of contemporary painting existed independently of the country of the painter's origin and that the notion of a regional art could not hold water.

Ironically, this is a curious reversal of the position that Contemporary South Asian art finds itself in today. As Contemporary 'Indian' art is increasingly sought after internationally - i.e. by Western collectors - the question that assails us is whether there is a split in the notion of value. Certainly, the worth of what we term 'Contemporary Indian art' is seen as being firmly rooted in the notion of a place, which is India.

Examining the link between art and value is quite relevant. The art market has become one of the most lucrative sectors of the global economy. What's more, because of the complex ways in which we ascribe value to art, it is a virtually unregulated area.

In the international art world, value is assigned in two ways. The first is from a relativist standpoint, the second from an absolutist one. While most of us tend to be relativist and acknowledge that there are no absolutes, we nonetheless attempt to establish them. The material value of an artwork is usually ascribed in relation to other artworks. Ranking tables are excellent examples of this practice. ArtTactic's ranking tables declare on a six-monthly basis the top ten Contemporary South Asian artists according to the company's interpretation of market confidence, while Osian's ET Art Index 1 calculates the average Square Inch Rate (SIR) - i.e. the 'price per square inch' - of artworks by fifty-one of India's leading artists. Geographic location (although stretched between South Asia and India) is central to both ArtTactic and Osian's formulations. This idea that we can fix a value to objects ultimately seeks the impossible: to make qualitative judgements about art, to ascribe it with an absolute value.

Our Postmodernist 'inheritance', though, gives us to understand that we are not in a position to assign just one value to one thing. As Virginia Woolf states, "For nothing is only ever one thing." Like Ukiyo-e prints - pictures of 'the floating world' - value resists fixing and is not absolute but tied to a particular time and place. Art as commodity is subject to a set of economic and geographic circumstances and is ultimately linked to demand. This is what lies behind Rabindranath Tagore's comment that "No art can exist out of context with the present," and what Arthur C. Danto means in his 1964 essay, The Artworld, when he states that art can only exist through interpretation: through the consent of 'the artworld'. In other words, ideas of value and quality shift with the times.

These days, the artworld is made up of artists, viewers, art historians, art fairs, institutions and so forth. Senior artists play key roles as arbiters of quality. In the formative years of the Lalit Kala Akademi, for instance, senior artists were judges of national awards for artists. But in India today, where more often than not, bureaucrats run public institutions and funding is scarce, crucial forms of independent peer judgement are sadly lacking and assessments of quality are open to manipulation by the market.

The fact that Western collectors are now actively seeking out Contemporary Indian art has had a huge impact on its burgeoning market. The latest spate of acquisitions of Indian art by Western collectors does not seem - on the face of it - to be driven by a notion of the exotic East. Collectors are buying new works that operate in the same artworld as Western art. The only way in which a movement towards the exotic creeps in is that in buying these works, Western collectors are breaking into a 'new market' - a different and, hence, an exotic one.

So, why has Contemporary Indian art become so valuable and desirable to Western collectors - like Frank Cohen, Charles Saatchi, Francois Pinault et al? Perhaps, the key lies in the way it is made. Very generally speaking, most Western countries are no longer production-centred economies and are driven instead by service-orientated industries. Indian and Chinese art are produced in countries that are recognised as regional superpowers with enviable labour pools. Both the countries have a 'buzz' quotient that many European countries lack. Western collectors are now speculating in art from India, seeking it out because of its distinctiveness.

In this context, it is worth examining an exhibition of Contemporary Indian art that was recently put up at a warehouse in Wolverhampton in the UK. It was titled, Passage to India: New Indian Art from the Frank Cohen Collection, and was on view from the 15th of March to the 2nd of August 2008.

Passage to India shed light on the relationship between Contemporary Indian art and value. The exhibition was symptomatic of the recent Western interest in Asian art. Passage to India was mounted in two unpretentious, interconnected warehouses on a very average industrial estate in the UK - in sharp contrast to the affluent Mayfair square mile where the majority of Contemporary Indian art exhibitions take place in London. By choosing an out-of-the-way warehouse as the site of this show, Cohen amusingly (if inadvertently) insisted that the London art world make a 'passage to India' - if only one that involved taking a train or the M6. The question of place seemed to be critical even here!