Art As An Investment

The Mei Moses Fine Art Index reports: "The spring and fall 2007 New York auction seasons were extremely vibrant, with higher prices and a larger number of works sold than in recent years. We added over 1000 repeat sale pairs to our data base which now comprises over 10,000 such pairs. The 2006 increase in the return of the Mei Moses® all art index of over 18.3 percent is recently only surpassed by some of the annual returns achieved during the art bubble years of 1984 through 1990. This result out paced the 15.8 percent increase achieved by the S&P 500 total return index (where dividends are reinvested tax free) for the same time period. However, gold exceeded both of these results with a return of 18.4%. It is also the first time that the most recent compound annual five and ten year returns for art, 11.6% and 8.5%, exceed the returns of stocks, 6.1% and 8.4% respectively. Art also outperformed bonds and bills during those periods. Stock performance dominates art over the last twenty five years, but is similar to art for the fifty year period ending with 2006. The index returns for longer time horizons are also investigated. These include a starting date of 1925, when the S&P was launched, and 1875, the earliest start date where we have sufficient contiguous annual data to achieve statistically significant results for our all art index. These long time periods show significant out-performance by equities over art and arts superior performance to U.S. government bonds, bills and gold." (For full source and article click the Headline). Irish Art