Provenance, Provenance, Provenance!

This painting, just sold at Christie's in London, practically gushes provenance. Borrowed from the French, the word serves the art world as a posh term for "a record of ownership of a work of art or an antique, used as a guide to authenticity or quality." 

Though this artist wasn't a big name in the art world, he was a big name. Winston Churchill painted Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque after the 1943 Casablanca Conference and gave it to Franklin D. Roosevelt.  In 2011 Brad Pitt bought the painting from a dealer and gave it to the seller, Angelina Jolie.

Expected to sell for perhaps $3 million, the only painting Churchill created during WWII sold for almost four times as much: $11.5 million.

World War II history, Churchill and Roosevelt, Hollywood stars …what more could the unidentified buyer ask?

Christo’s Estate Sale

Together with his late wife, Jeanne Claude, the artist known as Christo liked to wrap extraordinarily large objects. Christo died last year, but a posthumous work, L'Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped, may appear this fall. 

Meanwhile, Sotheby’s is auctioning off the couple’s arty possessions, including this screenprint they acquired from Damian Hirst. 

You can bid on the print, All You Need is Love, through February 18 online, but be prepared to offer more than 24,000 EUR.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Art for Our Unhealthy Times

 Six or seven years ago, prankster artist Banksy messed around with a painting by Damien Hirst to create this collaborative work. Today the painting serves as a pointed commentary on our Covid 19 crisis. Art is more than just a financial asset.

Nevertheless, at Sotheby’s October 28th auction of contemporary art, the Banksy-Hirst creation is expected to sell for two or three million. 

Are Both Hawaiian War Gods Worth Millions?

Unlike regular investments – stocks, ETFs, bonds – alternative investments such as art can be difficult to value. Perhaps that's why they're alternative investments.

Current illustration: doubts about the value of a wooden statue bought at a Christie's auction by billionaire Marc Benioff for about $7.5 million and donated to a Hawaiian museum.

Is Benioff's purchase, at left, the equal of the similar statue in the British Museum at right? Or is it "the sort of thing you see in a tiki bar"?

Art Appreciation

Approximate sales prices for a damaged, heavily restored painting now considered to be the work of Leonardo da Vinci:

1958

$125

2005

$10,000

2013

$80,000,000

2014

$127,500,000

2017

$450,000,000

Sources: Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times

Art as an Investment Class? It's Tricky

This Basquiat painting of a skull just sold at Sotheby's for over $110 million. Wow! Maybe investors really should regard art as an asset class, along with junk bonds, private equity and such.

But as White House advisers Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have learned, the notion of art as a serious wealth component can have unintended consequences. The other day they got criticized for failing to declare their art collection as a financial asset on the disclosure forms required for government work.

Conservative investors and their advisers may prefer to follow Northern Trust's advice and think of art collections as more akin to a second home or a yacht-charter business. Adam Lindemann. a prominent collector, blames the "art as investment asset" movement on the proliferation of art advisers: "There are almost as many of them as yoga instructors."

Lindemann's advice to investors? Buy art for art's sake.

Back in 2005, I asked Larry Gagosian if he believed art was an investment. He answered laconically: “Art is an investment, but that doesn’t make it a good investment.” At the time I thought his response was genius, but I’ve now changed my view, because investing requires cold analysis and objective thinking, and there’s no art in that. Art collecting is a different thing, it requires interest, patience and hopefully some passion, or at least intellectual curiosity.

What do you think? Will somebody ever be willing to invest more than $110 million in that skull?