Art as Asset Class: the New Gold?

High-priced artworks used to be collectibles. Now they're a red-hot asset class. Is the booming art market a bubble, inflated by speculators flipping paintings, that's about to burst?

Not necessarily, writes Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker. He cites an article by J. J. Charlesworth, a British critic who believes the very rich won't panic. Art is merely one of their alternative assets. a minor fraction of their wealth.

Indeed, today's global billionaires may see art not as a speculation but as the new gold.

[T]he most intriguing motive for the rampage of collecting involves a term unfamiliar to me: “store of value,” having nothing to do with a type of retail outlet. It is about liquidity that is vested rather than invested, and it speaks to dread. Besides being something that people buy when they already own everything else, art shares with gold and diamonds the desideratum (lacked by real estate) of being portable. Charlesworth observes that “alongside global prosperity has come a lot more political instability, and it’s in the interests of the social elite to keep their options open as to where they relocate.”

Your van Gogh is thus the equivalent of a packed suitcase kept under the bed against the morning of a telltale noise from the street outside.

Stores of value should be durable, like gold. Today's hot artworks? Maybe not so much. Consider the gilded beer carton.

Budweiser carton gilded by Danh Vo.

The carton was recycled and gilded by Danh Vo, an "early blue chip" artist popular with flippers. His unique artwork got pictured in The New York Times because Vo has a dispute with Bert Krenk, a wealthy Dutch collector. Krenk commissioned Vo to create an installation, perhaps along the lines of this one.  Vo provoked a legal battle by instead offering nothing but the Budweiser carton.

Do you think the corrugated paper box will last long enough to become an icon of our new Gilded Age?