Should you buy Latin American art?

A recent study by Sebastian Edwards suggests that Latin American art, in the latter quarter of the twentieth century, brought supra-normal returns with low risk relative to the market portfolio. Under one measure, the mean annual return was a solid nine percent. Here is the abstract:

In this paper I use a large data set to analyze two aspects of the Latin American arts: (1) the nature of artistic creative process, and (2) Latin American art as an investment. I use data on auctions to understand the relation between artists’ age and the value of their work. The analysis on creativity suggests that Latin American artists have followed very different patterns from that followed by U.S. artists. There is strong evidence suggesting that American artists born after 1920 did their best work at an earlier age than their older colleagues; exactly the opposite is true for the case of Latin America. Indeed, the results reported in this paper suggest that Latin American artists born after 1920 did their best work at a significantly older age than their colleagues from earlier cohorts. The analysis of art as an investment is based on the estimation of hedonic price indexes, and indicates that Latin American art has had a relatively high rate of return indeed much higher than that of other type of paintings. The results also indicate that returns on Latin American art have a very low degree of correlation that is, a very low beta relative to an international portfolio comprised of equities. This means that adding Latin American art will lower the overall risk of an international portfolio.

How can this be?: Most national art markets are driven by collectors from that country or region. The high investment returns on Latin painters suggest that the wealth of the wealthy, in Latin America, grew faster than expected for several decades. At the same time, some Latin painters, such as Frida Kahlo, attracted sudden and unexpected interest from North American buyers. So two particular idiosyncratic factors drove these superior returns. Mexican art is a great avocation of mine, but I cannot recommend it as a means of reducing your future portfolio risk. Buy what you love, and consider it consumption expenditure.

Comments

Comments for this post are closed