According to a new measure designed to rank the performance of art as an asset, Andy Warhol has outperformed the Standard & Poor’s 500 index over the past ten years. Warhol’s prices have increased fourfold while the S&P 500 has risen about 7 percent in the decade.

  Art is gaining ground as an alternative investment, with many new collectors coming from the financial industry and from emerging markets. Art has been a good investment over the past 10 years, but there are big differences in performance among artists. It’s more interesting to look at individual artists, in the same way that you look at stock-market segments, or individual companies.

  The art market has sustained its boom as stocks and bonds collapsed this year. While the S&P has fallen 1.3 percent, annual sales of contemporary art rose 35 percent from the previous year, according to Bloomberg News calculations.

 “Andy Warhol is an art-world colossus whose work accounts for one-sixth of contemporary-art sales.”

  The market backs the enthusiasm of the young. Those original soup cans are not for sale: bought by the Los Angeles dealer for $1,000, they were sold to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1996 for $15m, a deal that promoted Warhol to art’s first division. In 2008 a 12-foot-wide Warhol painting entitled “Eight Elvises”, made in 1963, broke the $100m barrier, putting him in the same lofty bracket as Picasso, Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Gustav Klimt. The highest auction price, meanwhile, is $71.7m for “Green Car Crash” (1963). To put these dizzying prices in perspective, Titian recently achieved his highest ever auction price—$16.9m for “A Sacra Conversazione” from about 1560. This is an important picture by an artist many regard as the greatest painter that ever lived. But the market says that Warhol is more than five times better. 

  Warhol is now the god of contemporary art. He is indeed, it is said, the “American Picasso” or, if you prefer, the art market’s one-man Dow Jones. In 2010 his work sold for a total of $313m and accounted for 17% of all contemporary auction sales. This was a 229% increase on the previous year—nothing bounced out of recession quite like a Warhol. But perhaps the most significant figure is the rise in his average auction prices between 1985 and the end of 2010: 3,400%. The contemporary-art market as a whole rose by about half that, the Dow by about a fifth. Warhol is the backbone of any auction of post-war contemporary art.

MUSEUM EXHIBITS

Picasso to Warhol:

Fourteen Modern Masters

October 15, 2011 – April 29, 2012

High Art Museum, Atlanta, GA

Picasso to Warhol will present more than 100 works of art created by 14 of the most iconic artists from the 20th century: Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Constantin Brancusi, Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio De Chirico, Joan Miró, Romare Bearden, Alexander Calder, Jackson Pollock, Louise Bourgeois, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. The museum exhibition will be one of the largest concentrations of modern art masterpieces to ever be exhibited in the southeastern United States.

The achievements of these pioneers of modern art will be presented in depth, exploring each artist’s stylistic development and highlighting their role in the most important artistic developments of the twentieth century, including the invention of Cubism, the emergence of abstraction and the development of Surrealism. Highlights of the exhibition include: Henri Matisse’s Dance (I), 1909; Pablo Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror, 1932, and Night Fishing at Antibes, 1939; Jasper Johns’s Map, 1961; Andy Warhol’s Self-Portrait, 1966; Constantin Brancusi’s Bird in Space, 1928; and Jackson Pollock’s, Number 1A, 1948.

LIVE GLASS BLOWING

   Watch LIVE as the master of his craft transforms the molten glass into phenomenal works of art. With the speed of a top professional athlete, the precision of a skilled surgeon, and the grace and flair of Fred Astaire the master glassblower delights spectators as he shapes the 2000º molten glass while adding color and exacting form.

   Glassblowing is an amazing medium requiring intense speed and quick thinking by the master, which makes it even more magical and entrancing for the audience to watch. The art of glass blowing is unlike any other media. Contact the gallery for future dates and times for LIVE glassblowing demonstrations at (480) 990-1200 or (800) 466-8276.

  The team of glassblowers at American Fine Art are constantly creating new works and experimenting with their media, combining glass, color, and precious metals to create breathtaking works of fine art glass. American Fine Art is currently hosting two American glassblowers from the East Coast.

Call today for this very rare,

limited edition release by

LeRoy Neiman