Why I Own Slivers of Paintings I Will Never Hang

Fifty-one thousand two hundred years ago, someone in a cave in Sulawesi painted three people and a wild pig, and arranged them so the picture told a story.

That is older than agriculture. Older than writing, older than the wheel, older than the first walled town. Researchers from Griffith University and Indonesia’s BRIN dated the Leang Karampuang panel using laser-ablation uranium-series analysis and published the result in Nature in July 2024. It is currently the oldest known narrative art on earth.

Think about what that means. Before we could farm, before we could write anything down, we could already make a mark on a wall that meant something to another person. Art is not a luxury that civilisation produced once it had spare capacity. Art came first. It is the oldest surviving evidence that there is a mind behind the eyes.

So when people ask why I put money into paintings, the honest first answer has nothing to do with returns. Owning a piece of a Cecily Brown or a Yoshitomo Nara connects me, in a small and very literal way, to the same impulse that put a pig on a cave wall in Sulawesi. That is not a financial argument so I am not going to pretend it is. But it is the reason I looked at the asset class at all, and I would rather say so than dress it up.

Now the financial part.

The gate, and how it opened

A serious Nara canvas trades in the millions. A Soulages, a Frankenthaler, a Joan Mitchell — millions. That market has always been open to the same people: those who can write a seven-figure cheque, absorb the buyer’s premium, insure the thing, store it, and wait a decade.

I cannot do that since I’m not an ultra-high net worth investor. Neither can you, probably.

Fractional platforms — Masterworks is the one I use — buy the canvas, put it into a single-purpose LLC, register the offering with the SEC, and sell you shares at $20 a piece. You own an economic interest in one specific painting. You do not get to hang it but you do get exposure to a market that was, for my entire working life, sealed.

That is the real attraction for me and not just the potential returns. Access. I now hold positions in thirteen works by Banksy, Nara, Soulages, Cecily Brown, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Colescott, Avery Singer, Liu Ye and Christine Ay Tjoe. Total outlay: $17,000. Not one of those artists would have taken my call.

Three of them, if you want to see what I actually own:

• Yoshitomo Nara, Under the Hazy Sky — my largest single position, Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale, Hong Kong, 2021
• Christine Ay Tjoe, First Type of Stairs — same Sotheby’s sale
• Yoshitomo Nara, Sprout in Hands — Sotheby’s 50th Anniversary Contemporary Evening Auction, 2023

The correlation argument, told straight

Here is the pitch you will hear everywhere: art does not move with the stock market, so it diversifies your portfolio.

From my own research, the measured correlation genuinely is low but I do think that it’s important for you to understand why before you lean on it.

Paintings trade rarely and are valued by appraisal in between. Appraisals smooth. A smoothed series cannot fall in step with a market that reprices every second — not because the underlying value is stable, but because nobody is looking. That is a measurement artefact dressed up as a risk property, and it is the same trick that made unlisted property look bulletproof for thirty years.

Art is not a luxury that civilisation produced once it had spare capacity. Art came first.

Worse, when researchers correct for the fact that owners choose when to sell — you sell the winner, you sit on the dog — the numbers deflate badly. Korteweg, Kräussl and Verwijmeren studied 32,928 repeat-sale paintings from 1960 to 2013 and found that selection correction cut average annual index returns from 8.7 per cent to 6.3 per cent, and the Sharpe ratio from 0.27 to 0.11 (Review of Financial Studies, 2016).

Nor is art independent of equities. Goetzmann, Renneboog and Spaenjers tracked art prices against markets from 1830 to 2007 and found equity capital gains — same-year and lagged — significantly drive art prices. Which makes sense. The people bidding at Sotheby’s got rich somewhere, and mostly they got rich in financial assets.

So: low measured correlation, yes. Real, structural independence from the wealth cycle, no. The diversification is thinner than the brochure suggests. It is not zero, and I still think a small allocation earns its place — but hold it for the right reason, and size it accordingly.

My own book, warts and all

I have had one exit. In August 2024 I put $1,000 into a Joan Mitchell. It exited in November 2025 at $23.40 a share — $1,170 back, a 17.0 per cent gain, roughly 12.7 per cent annualised. Clean, and exactly what the model promises when it works.

Across the twelve positions still open, the spread is wide. Cecily Brown’s This is Funfun is marked at $24.26 against my $20 cost — up 21.3 per cent, and it is my second-largest holding. Christine Ay Tjoe’s First Type of Stairs is up 16.9 per cent. Frankenthaler’s Seaspace, up 14.1 per cent.

The other side of the ledger is uglier. A Soulages is marked down 37.9 per cent. An Avery Singer, down 22.4 per cent. My biggest position of all, the Nara, is down 10.5 per cent.

Net of everything — one realised exit plus twelve open positions at Masterworks’ mid-point valuations — I am at roughly $16,773 against $17,000 invested, so I’m down about 1.3 per cent over three and a half years.

Over the same stretch the S&P 500 returned north of 100 per cent on a total-return basis. I am not going to pretend that away.

Two more things you should know before you copy me. Those valuations are Masterworks’ own appraisals, not transaction prices — two of my holdings carry no appraisal at all and sit at cost by default. And the platform takes 1.5 per cent a year plus 20 per cent of profits, which is a private-equity fee load on an asset that may take a decade to clear.

So why am I still in?

Because I did not buy this to beat the index. I bought it for a small, uncorrelated-ish sleeve of a portfolio that is otherwise entirely exposed to listed markets, and I bought it because I wanted to own a piece of the thing that makes us human. On the first count the jury is out. On the second, I am already paid.

So my advice to you, if you’re keen on art, is to keep it small. Be patient. And be honest with yourself about which of those two reasons is doing the work.

Sources

1. Oktaviana et al., “Narrative cave art in Indonesia by 51,200 years ago”, Nature, July 2024.
2. Korteweg, Kräussl & Verwijmeren, “Does it Pay to Invest in Art? A Selection-Corrected Returns Perspective”, Review of Financial Studies 29(4), 2016.
3. Goetzmann, Renneboog & Spaenjers, “Art and Money”, NBER Working Paper 15502.
4. Sotheby’s lot records.
5. S&P 500 annual total returns, Slickcharts.
6. Portfolio and transaction data: Masterworks account exports, 9 September 2026.