Banksy’s career has been marked by experimentation, risk, and a daring playfulness. His stencil-heavy motifs—of rats, cops, and kids with balloons—have simply become part of a shared cultural vocabulary, reproduced (and ripped off) with abandon. Banksy is less of an artist than a global phenomenon. He’s an anonymous graffiti superhero whose identity is endlessly debated by […]

The 19th-century artist, businessman and political philosopher William Morris wrote that people should live by a golden rule: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” This rule seems to divide economics  and art. Economics is about the useful. Art is about the beautiful (Art […]

The Museum of the Year Award, formerly known as the Gulbenkian Prize and the Art Fund Prize, is an annual prize awarded to a museum or gallery in the United Kingdom for a “track record of imagination, innovation and excellence”. A single award of £100,000, Britain’s biggest single art prize, is presented to a museum or gallery, large or small, anywhere in the UK. The Museum […]

The major strategies typically utilized by art investment funds include traditional “buy and hold” strategies; “geographic arbitrage”, which aim to exploit differences in price realization for certain artists’ works in different geographic locations; “artwork driven” strategies, which seek to profit from issues impacting a specific artwork’s offered price (such as issues relating to its condition, […]

Art funds are generally privately offered investment funds dedicated to the generation of returns through the acquisition and disposition of works of art. They are managed by a professional art investment management or by an advisory firm who receives a management fee and a portion of any returns delivered by the fund. The first institutional […]