When is Art an Asset?

Your art is not an investment, and neither is your watch, your jewellery or your whisky. We know this, right? An investment should pay a return, some sort of yield.

It's a pet peeve of mine to call art an investment. Art hangs there being wonderful, touching your soul, paying an emotional return. Which is rather the point of it.

First, an emotional asset

That emotional return is not a consolation prize. It's the main event. A piece of art you love does something for you every single day. It impacts the mood of every person experiencing that room. Ten years on, it still stops you occasionally, and that is a genuine return on the money.

Economists have a name for this which delights me: the psychic return. They worked out long ago that art's financial performance alone doesn't explain why people buy it, so there must be something else being paid out. There is. And you're basking in that glow.

And sometimes, a financial asset too

It can also be a financial asset: the two aren't in competition. Plenty of art does both.

You already know how an asset behaves. Nobody expects gold to post them a cheque each quarter. It goes up and down in value, but it's always worth something. Art can work the same way.

There are thousands of artists whose work resells on the secondary market seven times out of ten. The seller sets the price they'll accept, and gets that figure 70+% of the time. Now, that still isn't liquid. Finding a buyer might take a couple of years. But it is real and documented.

So with art, the question we should ask is "is this only an emotional asset, or is it both?" Either answer is fine. You should know which you're getting.

A quick word on vocabulary

The art world uses a few terms to describe artists that we should define. They aren't judgements of quality; they describe where an artist sits in the market. Here are three rough guides (for most oil paintings about 1 m.sq., other mediums have different ranges).

Emerging. Original work under roughly £10,000. There is a lot of stunning work here, and I mean that sincerely. But there's no established resale market, so you're buying with your heart. Which is a wonderful reason.

Mid-career. Roughly £10,000 to £50,000. The artist has a track record, exhibitions, maybe even some auction history. This is where many interesting decisions live, and where good advice earns its keep.

Established. Generally, £50,000+. These are currently consider assets; there is a clear secondary market, real data, real precedent. The price reflects that certainty.

Of course, these are rough guides. A photorealistic painter who takes months to produce a single piece may be 'emerging', but will need to charge over £10k to keep eating.

Whatever one acquires, the joy should live across all three. It's only the market beneath it that changes.

Some galleries are, shall we say, generous about which bracket their artists belong in. I understand the temptation. Just know the brackets yourself.

Galleries and advisors, and why they behave differently

I want to be careful here, because I like gallerists enormously; they do one of the hardest jobs in the art world. I ran a gallery myself. That's also why I don't anymore.

A gallery carries huge overheads that must be paid every month. That's an enormous weight to bear, and it colours every conversation. They have to try to sell what's on the wall. Today. Here's what we have; does any of it speak to you? Entirely reasonable. It's the job.

An advisor works from the other end. You have to book a meeting with an advisor. With no passing trade, we have to be service led. So the focus has to be on you, your taste, and your life. And an advisor can tell you something doesn't clear the bar, because saying so costs them nothing.

Building a collection off gallery advice is a little like asking the dealership which car you should buy. You'll get excellent answers. They just won't be independent ones.

The market is getting better at this

It used to be almost impossible to find out what art was worth, who was buying it, or when. From 1989, Artnet began compiling and selling auction results, and a good part of the art world was horrified. But the market responded so positively that for 30 years people spoke about 'art as an investment'.

It's nowhere near a perfect market. You won't get the clean, comparable pricing that a mature asset class gives you. But the pressure to fix that again is now real, and it's coming from an uncomfortable direction. Over the past decade, various indicators show that other alternative investments, like wine, watches, whisky, even baseball cards, have had extraordinary runs. Those markets have something art doesn't: transparent pricing, grading, population data. Art has been beaten by baseball cards, and the industry has noticed.

Proper structural change is finally underway. Writing this in 2026, the last couple of years have brought industry-wide moves that put more primary market data in the open than we have ever had, by a long way. We can be more clear-eyed about whether a piece of art is an asset than at any point in my career.

A few tips...

Which brings me to the practical part. Three things, and none of them require you to become an expert.

Give it a decade

Even a genuine asset needs time to behave like one.

Our rule of thumb: don't plan to sell anything for ten years. Art is still an illiquid asset. That's precisely why patience is rewarded here and impatience is punished.

Happily, ten years is no hardship when you love something.

Know what you're buying

When we're weighing up a mid-career artist, we aren't going on instinct alone. Over the years we've built a scoring framework: fifteen factors based on established career trajectories, covering items like where an artist trained, where they've exhibited, and museum purchases.

It isn't a perfect science. But it turns "does this feel right" into something we can repeat, and explain, and be held to. The sweet spot tends to be an artist who scores well but hasn't yet broken onto the secondary market: real substance, before the market has caught up with it.

You don't need our framework. An advisor should be able to say, out loud, why a piece would hold value. If they can't finish that sentence, you're buying an emotional asset, and that's fine, as long as you know it.

Use an advisor

Genuinely, I don't mind whether it's me. Use someone whose only job is being right for you. It's the cheapest insurance in this whole market.

If you'd like that someone to be me, you might start with my Taste Test. It's how I begin with most clients, and it starts where all of this should: with what you love.

Because that's the whole thing, really. Buy what moves you. Provided the cost aligns with your relationship to it as an asset. Taste is personal; expertise is not, and there's no reason on earth you should have to be your own expert.

Have a great weekend,

Richard
Founder