Priceless art is becoming more priceless

The market for famous works of art has seen a steady surge of demand in recent years that is pushing the average selling price up dramatically, according to The Wall Street Journal. Just six years ago it was extremely rare to find artwork that sold for over $100 million at auction. When one such piece, Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream,’ went for $119 million it elicited shouts of surprise and applause. Recently, bids over this milestone are much more commonplace and show no signs of slowing down.

Experts point out the fact that the ‘velocity of price appreciation’ in the art world has been a driving factor in many of the recent record-breaking prices. A painting by Amedeo Modigliani, ‘Reclining Nude,’ for instance, was sold in May for over $157 million while its most recent previous sale was for $26.9 million in 2003. This growth results in almost a 500 percent increase in value with yearly appreciation that easily outpaces the returns on financial products like stocks and bonds during the same period and proves that artwork can have a lot of investment potential.

The most extreme example of the astronomical prices that artwork can command came in late 2017 when Leonardo Di Vinci’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ sold for a headline-grabbing $450 million to a Saudi Arabian prince, according to USA Today. This particular piece had a long journey in arriving at that number as it was at different times lost, damaged, and considered a fake before it finally received restoration and a certification of authenticity. The art dealers who restored the painting paid less than $10,000 for it in 2005 before anyone realized it was real.