Saturday 19 September 2009

Old Master steps out

The New York Times reports on a Rembrandt portrait coming up for sale in December. It has an interesting "provenance", including a couple of years at Columbia University.

Saturday 13 June 2009

Les Echos

On March 23, the French newspaper Les Echos featured an article on 'Buying Beauty'. "L'exposition Andy Warhol à Paris constitue un événement de l'agenda artistique parisien. Le pape du pop art est aussi l'un des artistes les plus rentables pour les investisseurs avertis et qui ne craignent pas de prendre des risques, selon une étude de Luc Renneboog et Christophe Spaenjers, du département finance de l'université de Tilburg, aux Pays-Bas." The article also contained a nice graph - click below to enlarge it.

Monday 25 May 2009

Monday 6 April 2009

Stealing beauty

The Guardian reports on 'The Gardner Heist' and other art theft cases.
As audacious art heists go, the theft of da Vinci's Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911 ranks pretty high. The work was stolen after an Italian employee of the museum, Vincenzo Peruggia, who believed the work should be reclaimed by his country, simply slipped it under his jacket and walked out of the door. Peruggia kept the painting in his apartment for two years and was caught after trying to offload it to an Italian museum; he was jailed for just a few months and was hailed a hero by the Italian public. French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and Pablo Picasso were both taken in for questioning by police, but were released without charge. The work finally made its way back to the Louvre in 1913.

2008

Artprice.com has just published Art market trends 2008. Last year, the top-10 artists in terms of turnover at auction were: Picasso, Bacon, Warhol, Hirst, Monet, Giacometti, Richter, Degas, Fontana, and Klein. The list shows how post-war art has become the most important section of the market. (Koons, Basquiat, Freud, Prince, and Rothko can all be found between places 11 and 20.)

Thursday 2 April 2009

A thing of beauty

The Economist has a "special report on the rich", which includes an article on art prices. Read it here.

Monday 30 March 2009

Myriad dilettante art aficionados

Forthcoming in the American Economic Review: 'Art as an investment and conspicuous consumption good', by Benjamin Mandel. A great paper with an even better last paragraph: "Finally, this paper provides food for thought for the myriad dilettante art aficionados. In a boast, a friend once told me that his art was a better investment than all other assets, including financial securities and real estate. Accounting for his utility in telling me so, that is indeed likely."

1935

There are a few collectors, perhaps, who collect from a sheer love of the beautiful, but the majority undoubtedly now regard the money expended on their collections as so much invested capital.

[W. G. Menzies, 1935, 'Collecting as an Investment']

Monday 23 March 2009

Tuesday 17 March 2009

Monday 16 March 2009

Televisie

"Talita Teves is mede-directeur van Amsterdam Auctioneers, de nummer 3 van de Nederlandse kunstveilingmarkt. Ondanks de slechte economische verwachtingen en saneringen bij de Amsterdamse vestiging van Sotheby's verwacht Teves een goed jaar."

Thursday 5 March 2009

Caveat venditor

The Economist reports on the Yves Saint Laurent sale.

Buying Beauty

This paper investigates the evolution of prices and returns in the art market since the middle of the previous century. We first compile a comprehensive list of more than 10,000 artists and then build a dataset that contains information on more than 1.1 million auction sales of paintings, prints, and works on paper. We perform an extensive hedonic regression analysis that includes unique price-determining variables capturing amongst others: the artist’s reputation, the strength of the attribution to an artist, and the subject matter of the work. Based on the resulting price index, we conclude that art has appreciated in value by a moderate 4.03% per year, in real USD terms, between 1951 and 2007. During the art market boom period 2002-2007, prices augmented by 11.60% annually, which explains the increased attention to ‘art as an investment’. Furthermore, our results show that, over the last quarter of a century, prices of oil paintings and of post-war art have risen faster than the overall market. In contrast to earlier studies, we find evidence of a positive masterpiece effect: high-quality art makes a better investment. Our results are robust to alternative model specifications, and do not seem influenced by sample selection or survivorship biases. When comparing the long-term returns on art to those on financial assets, we find that art has underperformed stocks but outperformed bonds. However, between 1982 and 2007, bonds yielded higher average returns (at a lower risk) than art. Buyers of art should thus expect to reap non-pecuniary benefits rather than high financial returns, especially because the modest art returns are further diminished by substantial transaction costs.

Read more on prices and returns in the art market