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Put Your Assets on the Wall™

How Buying What You Love Can Get You the Return You Need

By Capucine Price

“Put Your Assets on the Wall™” details art’s unique history as an alternative for growing and preserving wealth. 

Today, art inspires a significantly higher degree of confidence than many of the nearest AAA-rated financial instruments.

“Put Your Assets on the Wall™” is a must read for anyone who is grappling with the quandary of how to invest in an era witnessing the ongoing dramatic decline in fortunes of traditional investments.  “Put Your Assets on the Wall” presents the timely analysis that demonstrates art’s superior investment performance during inflationary and other periods of financial upheaval throughout history. If investment methodology has one fundamental truth to tell, it is that proper asset allocation is the most important single investment decision an investor can make.  

In the midst of the current financial crisis, it’s clear that most savers and investors are overweighted in equities, despite recent experiences of the highest levels of volatility ever recorded. It may seem strange that a 14-year veteran small-cap value fund manager would say that, but in “Put Your Assets on the Wall™” Capucine Price uses the metrics of traditional investments to teach people about art as an alternative asset class, and a way to diversify one’s portfolio and hedge against volatility. 

In “Put Your Assets on the Wall,” former small cap value investor turned art entrepreneur Capucine Price helps people to gain an understanding of: 

Strategies to optimize portfolio performance

The role of alternative assets in a portfolio

How to inveset regardless of portfolio size

Why less expensive art outperforms

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The writer is a veteran portfolio manager, co-owner of CapucinesBoulevard.com, and the author of “Put Your Assets on the Wall.” The author applies her background and expertise in investment management, specifically in small capitalization value stocks, to the world of art. Before heading into cyberspace, Capucine helped spearhead William Blair & Co.’s development of a value investment discipline and related products for institutional and mutual fund investors. 

Website: http://www.bestartinvestments.com/

A new era of value equality is unfolding among the worlds’ artists. In the case of the price differential between the work of the contemporary ‘art stars’ and emerging artists, consider for a moment an important influencing factor also found in the stock market: uncertainty. For instance, a company operating in an industry where a key competitor suddenly becomes the subject of an investigation will undoubtedly see its stock price at least temporarily negatively impacted regardless of culpability simply because of investor uncertainty. Lack of knowledge in any industry acts as a damper on value, and let’s face it, the famous are such because to date they’ve received the entirety of the spotlight from the art market apparatchik, hence relatively little is known about those without such support.

However, the internet is THE equalizing factor. In an era where the internet functions as the facilitator of the distribution and promotion of the work of emerging artists from all over the world, the era of the ‘art star’ deemed such by the critics, curators and self-appointed art experts has come to a necessary end. 

In order to assess value and predict the direction of prices with respect to any asset, including stocks, it’s instructive to look at comparables. The work of the Old Masters and other dead artists has stood the test of time thus guaranteeing its worth in the form of the stratospheric prices garnered today. What is less clear is the rationale for the difference between the prices paid for the work of many contemporary artists and the much larger group of emerging artists. In any other industry, over time such a relative value disparity would disappear. 

Given the increasing recognition of the value of art today, equalization of the prices between discovered and undiscovered artists is inevitable if only because the relative value of the latter is highlighted. In the case of two stocks with equal earnings generating power where the sole exogenous, differentiating factor is the amount of ‘coverage’ by Wall Street that each receives, the difference in price to the long-term investor highlights the less expensive as a powerful value, and the common sense choice. Yes, the value stock may lack the imprematur of the big Wall Street analysts, but how many times have they overlooked a diamond covered in coal dust? Emerging artists are the greatest investment opportunity that no one has ever heard of.

 The traditional path to art world notoriety has usually included art school followed by showings in galleries, and being noticed and collected by well-known art patrons and eventually museums, with the accompanying media attention to keep it all going. Urban art has by all accounts turned this system on its head and instead of artists praying to start out in galleries they are finding their audience first, literally, out in the open, on the street.  From there, with the masses telegraphing their preferences via the internet, the attention-getting artwork then moves into the galleries. 

Artists’ long-held frustration at often not being able to have their work seen in galleries has, in the case of Urban Art, found an outlet in having unlimited audiences able to view their art, thus propelling it into the galleries.  In February, 2008 when Bono’s Red auction was held in New York it was Banksy’s work that set new price records even in the rarified company of work from some of the art world’s most lauded producers.  The Tate Modern in London, the world’s most visited Modern Art Museum,  in May hosted ‘Street Art,’ an exhibition during which an entire side of its building was utilized by Urban artists.  

As accessibility has driven the meteoric rise of Urban Art sales worldwide, the availability of emerging artists’ work on facilitating mechanism that is the internet will eventually yield the same trajectory.