Should You Invest in Art?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been burned by the stock market more times than I care to remember! I do all my research and I even do fairly in depth stock analysis (and I was even trained in college to do it correctly!). But inevitably, I just flat out pick the wrong stocks and I lose money…

Finally I decided to stop investing in the stock market and look for alternative forms of investment. Gold is particularly nice right now because we seem to be heading into a highly inflationary period, and during those times gold historically does pretty good. But you can’t invest completely in gold because you miss out on quite a bit of growth. So what should you invest in?

Many people choose to invest in art and I like the idea of that so I thought I would write a short article on it.

First and foremost you have to understand this main idea… when it comes to art you should only ever invest because the art piece provides pleasure for you – NOT because it may go up in value. Let me say that again because it is important, you should only buy art because you like it, not because you think it will be worth money in the future.

Sure we’re looking at it as an investment and of course we would like for it to increase in value over time but that really shouldn’t be your primary purpose when it comes to investing in art. Art is a fickle creature. Some paintings go up, some don’t, and some go down. It’s a very illiquid market meaning that even if you want to sell, you may not always be able to right away.

For those reasons alone you should stick to buying art that you like to look at. That way no matter what happens you’ll still have a piece of art that you enjoy and that you can pass down to your children if you choose to do so.

Good art has to be able to stand the test of time because what is popular today may not be popular tomorrow and so your investment strategy should reflect that reality.

Be careful of purchasing prints as investment grade pieces because in general contemporary art that’s mass-produced doesn’t really increase in value all that much over time. The fact of the matter is, they may have produced thousands or even tens of thousands of the same print.

If you enjoy the art world, if you enjoy learning about different artists and their different works then investing in art is something that could fill you with great joy – completely apart from any money you may earn over the long-term. If you’re the kind of person that isn’t interested in art at all and is just looking for something to invest in, then you should really stay away from art as an investment.

This article may not have been particularly helpful to you unless it scared you away from art. The main thing I can stress again is that you only buy art because you like it and don’t worry about the investment part of it too much.

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