Article on Masterworks

Contemporary Art in the first quarter of the 21st Century

I included a link to this article in yesterday’s post. It didn’t work, though I have since fixed it.

There is frequently a question of choosing the best vehicle for presenting a piece: Substack, PDF, email, video or whatnot.

Substack does a fair job with this, though it is too long for email. Anyhow, making up for yesterday, here it is.

Graham

I recently presented a review of Tom Wolfe’s 1975 “The Painted Word” as a Toastmasters speech His theme is that what is said and written about art is more significant, affects its value more than the subject matter or the aesthetic aspects such as color, form, texture, composition and balance.

A follow-up search for which paintings have had the greatest investment value led me to masterworks.com, a company of art experts who pool money from small investors in paintings, and some sculpture, that they expect to appreciate in value. Their investment pools typically hold a work of art that costs them between a few hundred thousand and ten million dollars for one to three years. They claim internal rates of return as much as 35% per year.

Predicting taste in art is a tricky business. Their organization has 125 employees, a majority dedicated to selecting, buying and selling works of art. For my own edification, I selected from the Internet one work from each of the artists mentioned in their prospectus, just to satisfy myself as to the validity of Tom Wolfe’s observations.

Many of the artists have obvious stories. Carmen Herrera was a Cuban woman who took up painting at 84 and lived to 106. Japanese artistry has obvious roots in their culture. Haitian and Black American art reflects the artists’ life experiences. I have not read what critics have written about these works, but it is easy to imagine them to be urban Americans enamored of diversity, environmentalism and the therapeutic society. Masterworks has no investments in George Rockwell, Grant Wood or James McNeill Whistler.

The fifty years since Wolfe’s book will be the topic of another speech, one which will certainly include some of the images here.

Graham

June 13, 2025

Masterworks Artists

Adrian Ghenie

Banksy

Bridget Riley

Carmen Herrera

Cecily Brown

Dana Schutz

George Condo

Gerhard Richter

Helen Frankenthaler

Henry Taylor

Hernan Bas

Laura Owens

Lynne Mapp Drexler

Mark Bradford

Martin Wong

Park Seo-Bo

Sam Gilliam

Simone Leigh

Stanley Whitney

Yayoi Kusama

Yoshitomo Nara