Phil Whittaker, the director of Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Singapore. (Aranya Sen)

The Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Singapore, plans to start short-term (not more than five days) courses from September-October in the city if it can cross all legal and bureaucratic hurdles.

Phil Whittaker, the director of the institute, returned to Singapore on Friday afternoon, after testing the waters in Calcutta, and said before leaving: “It is early stages yet. We will pilot short courses around autumn. The degree courses may follow and the programme will allow students to take up part-time jobs.”

The Sotheby’s institute offers two courses — one in which the focus is on contemporary pan-Asian art history and aesthetics, while the other zeroes in on art business with stress on law, ethics and marketing. The courses cost a cool $40,000 for a year.

Most of the institute’s courses are business oriented. Whittaker said his aim was to “populate India with art professionals and not just people with experience”.

The director made it clear that the institute chose Calcutta as its launching pad for strategic reasons. “We are doing this because of our contacts in Calcutta. Not for geographic or historic reasons,” he said quite categorically.

Whittaker explained that the courses had little to do with aesthetics and pertained more to the art of selling art. This became obvious as he spoke about his chequered career. From UK, he joined the British army in 1973, when he was 17. When he left the army he was a major, but not before he had done business management courses.

Thereafter he taught — at Ashridge, a UK-based management development college, and University of Strathclyde Graduate School of Business as a lecturer in information systems strategy and data management — and did further management studies as well.

He was recruited to set up the Singapore office, which opened in 2007. The institute’s London office turned 40 this year, and has a counterpart in New York as well.

It separated from the eponymous auction house in 2003 and is now with the Cambridge Information Group, although an agreement exists to continue with the Sotheby’s brand image and expand the institute.

In Singapore, the institute has 40 students, mostly Americans and Koreans, and five Indian nationals as well. The courses are vocational programmes that “maintain a link with the real world”.

Whittaker described the degrees from the University of Manchester as a “gateway to a career in art industry”. He stressed that the “key weakness in the art markets of Asia” is that infrastructure is undeveloped, and the institute in its small way could help correct the situation.