The decision to invest in any collectibles market should start with curiosity and love, and buying art is no exception. While the rarest works of art in the world have sold for hundreds of millions of dollars, for most collectors, art is unlikely to match the returns offered by traditional investment markets.
A recent analysis of 10-year annualized returns including data through 2024 showed that the stock market vastly outperformed art. True, it has been an incredibly strong bull market on a historical basis, but the performance from the art market over the same time period produced some of the worst 10-year returns in seven decades.
As with any asset class experiencing a downturn, some experts see the recent weakness as a buying opportunity. The 2025 market did see some improvement, and 2026 has been an ever better year to date, with younger buyers showing up in a big way. But experts also stress that the art world is the least transparent market imaginable, with significant "insider information" involved in anticipating big jumps and the next major wave of hype.
"What I tell people is that there is so much inside information in the art world — for instance, who has bought a particular artist or who is getting a museum show in two years — that if you are an outsider, you have little hope" of catching the next big wave early, said Canice Prendergast, economics professor at the University of Chicago, who also oversees that Chicago Booth School of Business Harper Center's contemporary art collection, which houses more than 650 artworks.
It is important to understand that generating a repeatable investment strategy can be difficult — if not impossible.