The newsletter was crafted by us and sponsored by our friends at Masterworks.
We've written a lot about alt investments lately. Fine art is a tried and true alt.
The problem: If you want to own any in your portfolio, you’re going to need a $10,000,000 check.
Why own art at all? Hedge funds do it because that’s where they make the biggest returns. According to Citi, contemporary art prices crushed S&P 500 returns by 174% from 1995-2020, and over two-thirds of billionaire collectors allocate 20% or more of their portfolios to art.
Masterworks started disrupting the art industry in 2017 and has been a leader in this space. The team had recognized that only the wealthiest investors got the jump on the most groundbreaking technologies, like bitcoin for example, and re-invented the game for blue-chip art.
Many think of fine art as the largest un-securitzed asset class (worth $1.7 trillion), meaning the value of a piece of work can’t be pooled into a group of tradeable assets, like a company does with its public stock. That’s exactly what Masterworks did though. The company has purchased over $150M in art and has amassed over 165K users. With their proprietary art Price Database, they took 75,000 data points from 6,000 artists and auction sales to build a comprehensive art database, investment platform, and secondary market for fine art.
Since its launch, Masterworks has become the largest platform for investing in blue-chip art from artists like Banksy, KAWS, and Picasso.
Here’s a preview from the database.
- Gerhard Richter, A B, Still. Purchase Price $264K, Sale Price: $33.98M. 128x return
- Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled. Purchase Price: $121,762. Sale Price: $29.3M. 420x return
- Christopher Wool, If You. Purchase Price: $305,000. Sale price: $23.7M. 77x return.
The team at Masterworks has been working to democratize ownership of high-end artwork because they’ve seen the returns for investors.
Now they have released the database to everyone with no strings attached so you can browse artwork for free. The database and matching algorithm make it simple to see the value of the artwork and what your investment can deliver.
Product Hunt subscribers are getting first dibs. You can skip the 15,000 person waitlist by clicking below. See disclaimer.
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