The Dangers of Investing in Art

As elite guests walked into a new exhibition at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach in December, they were greeted by a cluster of three abstract black-and-white paintings. Created by German artist Anselm Reyle, the monochrome works were nothing less than a middle finger to the art world. The show was assembled by Peter Marino, an architect known as much for his outré leather biker outfits as his luxe retail interiors for Chanel and other companies. Including the Reyle paintings in his show was a trademark act of defiance—an unsubtle reminder to art speculators that their whims often transform art into a terrible investment they’d prefer to forget. “People don’t like artists whose price goes down,” says gallery owner and collector Adam Lindemann, who owns a work by Reyle. “The art market died in 2009 for about a year, and there were some casualties. Reyle was a noteworthy one, and so the art market selected him as a pariah.”

In the contemporary art world, where it’s common for recently discovered artists to sell works for hundreds of thousands of dollars, there’s a perception the market is unstoppable. The precipitous fall of Reyle is a reminder that important backers, high prices, and insider buzz have their limits, and even beautiful art can be a fundamentally fickle asset.