The main thing that’s driving the growth of the art market is the demand for a good investment for the very rich, art advisor Todd Levin said.
Levin, standing outside the convention center in Basel, Switzerland, was referring to the brisk sales inside at Art Basel, the world’s largest modern-and contemporary-art fair. A self-portrait by Andy Warhol sold for $32 million within 15 minutes of the fair’s start on June 17. Other numbers were impressive: $4 million for a David Hockney landscape; $3 million for a Fernand Leger painting; $250,000 for a towering sculpture by Thomas Houseago.
“It’s about the need of high-net worth investors to park their excess capital,” said Levin, director of Levin Art Group in New York. “They don’t want to keep it in cash in the bank. They can’t put it in a mattress. Art has historically provided the greatest intergenerational return of any asset class.”
The Artnet C50 Index, which combines performance data from 50 top contemporary and postwar artists, advanced 434 percent from the start of 2003 through last year, beating asset classes including gold, fine wine and stocks.
Art sales increased 8 percent from 2012 to 2013 to 47.4 billion euros ($65.9 billion), nearing the high reached in 2007, according to an annual report published by the European Fine Art Foundation in Maastricht, Netherlands. Auction houses in New York sold a record $2.2 billion of modern, Impressionist, postwar and contemporary art last month.
Step Ahead
Wealthy art collectors may be a step ahead of other investors. Multimillionaires have a high allocation to cash, according to a survey released today from U.S. Trust, a unit of Bank of America Corp. Sixty percent of respondents, who had at least $3 million in investable assets, said they had at least 10 percent of their money in cash. Last year, 56 percent of those surveyed said they had a large amount in cash.
These investors may have taken notice that their parked cash isn’t earning much as central banks globally push down interest rates. About 17 percent of millionaires said they plan to move some money out of cash in the next 12 months, the survey said.
In Basel this week, bearish outlooks were a rarity as dealers reported strong sales and broad international attendance. First time visitors from China, India and the Middle East are among the 86,000 people expected to attend through the fair’s end on June 22, organizers said. About 284 galleries from 34 countries offered as much as $4 billion worth of art, according to an estimate by insurer AXA Art, a sponsor of the fair’s 45th edition.
Rising Values