Does art make a good investment?

The art market is enjoying a boom not seen since the dizzy days of the late 1908s. New records are being broken in the auction houses. Fine art is a huge investment, but is it a good one?

The art market is enjoying its dizziest ride since the late 1980s, with price records broken over the past month as Gustav Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer fetched £73m to become the world's most expensive painting. Klimt joins Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet, Cezanne, Matisse, Degas, Modigliani amd Chagall in the so-called blue-chip brigade', which commands the highest prices and biggest international interest.

Living artists are also benefiting from the bonanza. David Hockney's The Splash (pictured) achieved £2.9m £1m more than his previous record set only a month earlier, while Bridget Riley's Untitled (Diagonal Curve) joined the small group of women artists whose work attracts over £1m.

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At these prices, fine art represents a huge investment, says Daniel Gross in Slate. But is it a good one? Professors Michael Moses and Jianping Mei of New York University have compiled an index tracking long-term performance. It found that a Turner view of Venice, which sold at Christie's in May 1897 for $35,000, fetched $35.8m when auctioned this April a "pretty darn good" 6% annual return over 109 years. However, the index shows prices lagged the S&P 500 over the past 50 years; it only beat stocks in the five years 2001-2005.

Will boom turn to bust? The last boom was snuffed out when Japan collapsed in 1989. The subsequent crash "saw New York's SoHo, then the city's main gallery district, end up a ghost town", says Higgins. Current wisdom, is that the new globalised market is more stable. Current wisdom is probably wrong.

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