Well, I don’t want to hijack, and I apologize if my snark was over the top, but I reread my posts and I’m kinda baffled. Cars loose a bunch of their value when you drive them off the lot and eventually become worth a fraction of what you pay for them. Van Goghs don’t.
I’ve watched Antiques Roadshow a few times, and sometimes the appraiser says, “Well, a couple of years ago, this painting might have fetched $50,000 at auction, but the market for paintings of Elvis on velvet has cooled somewhat so today you might only get $25,000.” In other words, particular artists and genres fall in and out of fashion.
Fine art, sports cars, and haute couture all can lose monetary value quickly, even though their “intrinsic” value may not (yes, an “artistically valuable” painting remains “artistically valuable”, in some sense, but just as well, sports cars are still perfectly capable of driving you conveniently from place to place once they’ve depreciated, haute couture is still well-fitting clothing, etc.). There’s no difference between them in that regard.
In fact, all three of these items are similar, in that a large part of their purpose is to look good and convey status, and the fashions of what looks good change over time. But only sports cars and haute couture, of these three, have other, more utilitarian purposes as well.
(It is perfectly plausible that Van Goghs would lose value over time, or if not Van Goghs, some other artist’s work. The monetary value of fine art isn’t necessarily tied to how great it is artistically, and even how great it is artistically is a subjective judgement on which mainstream opinion can change)
BTW, another example of how art can lose value is what happened to the Picasso painting that the casino mogul and art collector Steve Wynn was planning to sell. He accidentally elbowed it while showing it off and it lost tens of millions of dollars in value. That sort of thing wouldn’t happen to an intangible investment like stocks or bonds.
Huh. Well ok, but I would have made a distiction between speculative investing in currently popular, or up an coming velvet Elvises and established fine art. A chunk of land could loose it’s value, a specialized company could loose it’s value, so could a Van Gogh.
I mentioned earlier that I feel fine art is currently in a speculative bubble. And I stand by that. Fifty years ago, the record price ever paid for a painting was around five million dollars. Twenty-five years ago, the record was around twenty-five million dollars. Now it’s around two hundred and fifty million dollars.
Let’s face facts, there hasn’t been a fifty-fold increase in the overall value of fine art in the last fifty years. At some point the bubble is going to pop and the prices will plunge back down to around the ten million dollar range.
Is should be noted that Wynn has RT which limits his vision considerably, so the mistake is less likely to happen to others.
But that $250mm price is/was far above the next most expensive painting, and was more likely the result of an irrational buyer with basically unlimited resources. While there may, in fact, be a bubble, the relative dearth of investment opportunities for the super-rich, and the confidence that they will stay super-rich, might allow the “bubble” to persist for a long time.
Wikipedia has a list of the 46 most expensive paintings ever sold (or those sold for more than $62 million in inflation-adjusted dollars). (Unfortunately it lists a painting only once, even if it sold more than once for $62+ million.)
Like many Wiki lists you can click to sort the list by date, etc. I did note that there were only a few of these high-price sales during 1991-1998, when stock markets were very hot. We’d want to look at a very different sort of graph or table but I don’t know how to Google for it.
Am I the only one shocked that Jackson Pollock’s No.5, 1948 had the record until the Cézanne that just sold?
ETA: Let me rephrase that. I’m rather shocked by the Cézanne price as well. :smack:
Might these be Chinese or Russian buyers shelling out those kinds of bucks?
SOmebody remind me to tell the story of the Edward Hopper (I Truly Believe) I got sitting here.
Quite possible. There has been a lot of speculation about the fate of the paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (none were ever recovered).