Art as a Store of Value

Ha!
Ha I say.
Izabella talks art at FT Alphaville:

Art as the sophisticated man’s Bitcoin

There’s a post FT Alphaville has been trying to write about the art market for a while now. At least a year. Problem is, nobody will talk honestly about the angle we want to discuss.

That being: how much art is being “mined” purely to satisfy the demand for ‘safe-ish’ assets in a liquidity saturated world. Safe assets, which we should add, are often held in bonded warehouses in places like Geneva, outside of the reach of tax authorities, and which later become a type of bearer security in their own right as the depository receipts which allow redemption of the assets begin to circle amongst the wealthy as their own type of non-taxable currency....MUCH MORE

She goes on to mention a few stories that we've also looked at:
"High-end art is one of the most manipulated markets in the world"
Value Added-- "Historical Echoes: Andy Warhol and the Art of Money 
That latter, combined with the statement "In the age of automated labour and a leisure class, we all become artists and creatives." may, if you are as jaded and cynical as I, get you to at least smile.

Supply will meet demand.
Warhol was very conscious he was cranking the art out to meet demand, his studio was called The Factory.

So too was the "Painter of light" Thomas Kinkade. Last year a Salon.com story referred in passing to how he got to $100 mil in annual revenues:

...The novel, first in a series, was produced much as his paintings are: by a semi-industrial process in which low-level apprentices embellish a prefab base provided by Kinkade....

Another "artist" doing the assembly line thing is Jeff Koons, see last year's NYT Magazine:
I Was Jeff Koons’s Studio Serf, or this year's "Why Not to Work for Jeff Koons"

These guys were just pikers. Taking the sensibility to the next level we have a Spiegel's story: 

China's Art Factories: Van Gogh From the Sweatshop
Southern China is the world's leading center for mass-produced works of art. One village of artists exports about five million paintings every year -- most of them copies of famous masterpieces. The fastest workers can paint up to 30 paintings a day.

Finally, a couple months ago we reached the natural end-point:
Robots: Yes But Is It Art?

From Singularity Hub:
Reprogrammed Assembly Line Robots Make Fine Art in San Francisco

So yes I smiled at the juxtaposition:

...And yet, despite the closed and networked nature of salon society, the art world does have something going for it in an age increasingly dominated by abundance, output gaps and over productivity.

Even if values of what classifies as aesthetically pleasing change, allowing greater access to those artists whose talents might not have been considered worthwhile in years gone by, can there ever really be enough creative and visionary expression in the world?
In the age of automated labour and a leisure class, we all become artists and creatives....

Back to the store-of-value question, a lot of folks got away from Nazi Germany and the countries the Nazi's invaded and were able to re-establish themselves by means of tiny little pictures, postage stamps.

Previously:
The Hedge Funds of the Art World
“Does it Pay to Invest in Art? A Selection-corrected Returns Perspective”
Wildenstein: The Art World's Most Powerful Dealer Family
How to Do Art
Heinrich Campendonk in the News: "German Art Forgery Scandal Reaches Hollywood"
What does Whitey Bulger know about the 1990 Gardner Museum art heist?
Inside Sotheby's
Marketing: Campbell's Channels Andy Warhol for New Cans (CPB)
Would You Like to Come Up and See Mein Klimt?
How Do You Sell a Stolen Painting?
Let's Hope the Drapes Match: "Persian rug from 1600s fetches record $33.7M at auction"
That last post is interesting because it marks the opening of a whole new category of supply for the "10-mil and up" crowd.
"Money for the Most Exquisite Things: Bankers and Collecting from the Medici to the Rockefellers"