“Art as an Investment – A Survey of Comparative Assets”Īimed at collectors and investors, this user-friendly guide explains art’s value as an asset through comparisons with more familiar investments, including property, shares and gold. With the same captivating style of her bestselling Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century, Georgina Adam casts her judicious glance over a section of the art market whose controversies and intrigues will be of eye-opening interest to both art-world players and observers. Adam’s revelations appear even more timely in the wake of the Panama Papers revelations, for example incorporating examples of the way tax havens have been used to stash art transactions – and ownership – away from public scrutiny. Drawing on a series of tenaciously wrought interviews with artists, collectors, lawyers, bankers and convicted artist forgers, the author charts the voracious commodification of artists and art objects, and art’s position in the clandestine puzzle of the highest echelons of global capital. The buying of art as an investment, temptations to forgery and fraud, tax evasion, money laundering and pressure to produce more and more art all form part of this story, as do the upheavals in auction houses and the impact of the enhanced use of financial instruments on art transactions.

This book scrutinizes the excesses and extravagances that the 21st-century explosion of the contemporary art market brought in its wake. “Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses Of The Art Market In the 21 Centry” On a weekly basis we will be publishing in this section books and reports on the art market.

Owning Art by Louisa Buck