A real art to amazing investment

Mark Dawson, Editor of Wanganui Chronicle

Here at the Chronicle, we are always keen to offer tips and bits of useful advice.

So here's one ...

Go out to your shed or into the spare room - or even attic or cellar (in fact, anywhere you have old junk stashed away) - and have a rummage. See if you can come up with an old Van Gogh or Picasso or similar artwork by some deceased dauber.

I mention this because of last week's news that Picasso's Les Femmes d'Alge was sold at auction for US$179 million. I was astonished by this. A trifling 179 mill? What has gone wrong with the art world?

If I had been passing by Christie's auction house in Manhattan at the time, I would have been in there like a shot and made sure the price was soon tickling the 200 million mark.

It was a good week for Christie's - they also sold Mark Rothko's No. 10 (a subdued, fuzzy-edged, orange-ish rectangle on black canvas) for US$81.9 million. I wonder what his No. 11 will fetch should he ever get round to painting one?

Going, going ... gone in the same week were a Lucien Freud nude for US$56.2 million; Andy Warhol's Mona Lisa (US$33 million) and Sotheby's auctioneers parted company with a "bad" Van Gogh for more than US$50 million.

Reports suggested that it was not art connoisseurs who were purchasing these works, but people with no great love or understanding of art who wanted the "trophy" aspect of a very expensive canvas by a famous name to show off to their mates.

Nothing wrong with that, but I suspect it might not be the whole truth.

Recently, the chairman of New York-based asset management company BlackRock - which, with more than US$4.77 trillion in its hands, is the world's largest asset manager - opined that contemporary art was the best investment you could make. Even safer than gold.

So there you have the best advice of all. Snap up a piece of abstract impressionism or whatever, sit on it for a couple of years and then cash in big time. It even beats investing in the Auckland property market where houses, apparently, only go up in value by a measly $1000 a day.

Does Bill English know about this? It's a sure fire way for him to finally nail that surplus he's been chasing all these years.