The trend in many alternative asset classes is to make previously illiquid and high-value investments like art, collectibles, farmland, and music royalties more accessible to us common folk by offering fractional ownership. From the comfort of my smartphone, I can buy a $250 fractional share of a Shelby Mustang and hope to sell my equivalent of a turn signal stalk at a tidy profit in the future.
does this for art, letting you invest as little as $500 into multi-million dollar works of art by artists like Basquiat, Picasso, and Banksy. The pitch is pretty direct:
Contemporary art has outperformed the S&P for the past 25 years, but there has been no way to invest in it. Masterworks is the first company to offer investment products within the art market.
The Masterworks website claims that the Contemporary Art asset class has returned 13.8% annualized from 1995-2021, much more than the 10.2% from the S&P 500. This data “reflects value-weighted price appreciation for all Contemporary Art (works produced after 1945) sold at least twice at public auction.”
In addition, this chart from a shows that Contemporary Art had a very low and even slightly negative historical correlation with stocks (Developed Equities, -0.04) and bonds (Investment Grade Fixed Income, 0.15).
Alright, but how about some more data points? Recently, the estate of Paul Allen sold off an record-breaking $1.6 billion of art, most of which was also both bought and sold at a public auction. This gives us both the purchase and sell prices and the ability to calculate annualized return. This included an analysis and created the chart below.
Some sales are impressive, like a Cézanne that was bought for $38 million and sold for $138 million less than 20 years later. A cool $100 million profit ain’t too shabby. However, once you calculate the overall return including the holding periods, the annualized return was only 6.2% annualized over an average holding period of 18 years. Axios notes that the S&P 500 grew at 8.9% annualized over the past 18 years, which allows them to drop this zinger:
The bottom line: Allen would have made more money just buying an S&P 500 index fund.
I can see art as as an asset class having positive long-term returns in the future, and I can see it having a rather low correlation to stocks, but I suppose that I have a hard time seeing it return something amazing and consistently better than the S&P 500. Especially for any basket of specific pieces, it may return 4% more than the S&P 500 annually, or it may return 4% less than the S&P 500 annually. This would be more of a fun, amusing thing – “I own a flower petal from that Monet!” – that might retain permanent value in the future.
(I can’t tell a Stella from a Seurat, so I have no personal investment in Masterworks.)
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