How I Made $5000 in the Stock Market

Buy Art, Sell Art. How This New Tool Is Taking Out the Guesswork.

Oct 22, 2025 02:30:00 -0400 by Abby Schultz | #Wealth

Yayoi Kusama is among artists with high ”investment potential,” according to a new online database. (Christopher Furlong / Getty Images)

Key Points

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Pierre Soulages, and Yayoi Kusama are the highest-ranked major-market artists with works that can be expected to deliver a positive return on investment.

That’s according to an analysis using ArtistIP, a new website of artist investment tools created by Michael Moses and Jianping Mei, academics who have long studied repeat sales of artworks at the major auction houses to reveal often hidden trends.

The site draws from a database of about 1,000 artists whose individual works have been sold at least 10 times at auctions held at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and/or Phillips. Mei and Moses track “repeat sale pairs” of art sold in the year 2000 or later—that were originally purchased in 1970 or later—to compute compound annual returns for each work.

Basquiat, Soulages, and Kusama have the best chance of delivering positive investment results among artists whose markets have “high liquidity”—meaning a lot of people own their art and often buy and sell it.

Among artists with a “moderate” level of liquidity, a list of those with the best investment potential puts Mark Rothko on top, followed by Norman Rockwell and Morris Louis.

Both of these lists are determined by giving equal weight to four performance metrics that get under the hood of what’s happening in a market that’s notoriously opaque and illiquid.

The metrics are: market size (a measure of liquidity); the percentage of works offered by these artists at auction that have sold; the market-adjusted risk per unit of return for each artist’s work; and the percentage of each artist’s work that sold at a loss.

“Since we can determine a value for each of the four metrics based on our repeat-sale database, we can then come up with a unique ‘artist investment potential’ for each artist based on [a user’s] particular weights,” says Moses, a former professor at New York University.

A collector only interested in artists with a high market-adjusted risk per unit of return, for instance, could weight that metric 100%, allocating zero percent to the other three. That adjustment produces a list with Soulages on top, Basquiat as No.2, and Joan Mitchell No. 3. Kusama is still ranked highly, but in fifth place.

Either list offers insight, depending on an individual investor’s viewpoint. “There’s no correct weight,” Moses says. “It’s all personal. We’re trying to build a bespoke approach to artist selection.”

Collectors using the tools may be more likely to investigate whether a work by a single artist they like is a good investment. Someone considering buying a painting by Helen Frankenthaler, for instance, would learn that the artist’s works have a mean return of 11.85% with a standard deviation—a measure of market variability or risk—at 7.35% (a standard deviation below a mean return is considered a comfortable level of risk).

A collector would also learn Frankenthaler has a highly liquid market, and her paintings are expensive, according to the tool. It also provides details on the artist’s specific paintings that have been brought to auction—whether they sold or not. For instance, in July 2020, Frankenthaler’s Head of the Meadow was sold at Phillips for $3 million; in 2013, the same work had been sold at Christie’s for $543,750.

Digging deeper, a user would find that the current value of Head of the Meadow based on compound annual returns since 2000 would be $3.68 million. But if the work’s value were assessed using the most recent sale price that is marked-to-market using a proprietary artist liquidity index, the value of the painting today would be $2.25 million. The marked-to-market value is typically more conservative as it accounts for downturns in the market, as the art world is experiencing currently.

The database also allows users to do a similar analysis on works that were brought to auction but didn’t sell.

A key part of the website’s data is its ability to allow a user to find an overall “artist investment potential” score for an artist based on his or her desired metrics.

If equal weighting is given to each of the four metrics, Frankenthaler’s artist investment potential score would be 1.24. Artists with the smallest positive artist investment potential scores have the best investment potential. Frankenthaler’s score lands her at No. 7 among artists with highly liquid markets when all four metrics are equalized.

Collectors that want to see how realistic their scores are can compare them to a “crowd source” score that’s created from all the users on the site. Also, by looking at a ranking of similar artists, collectors can also see whether there are other artists with favorable scores whose works sell at lower prices.

The website also analyzes artist momentum—or the role of enthusiasm on investment performance. This is done by comparing an artist’s returns over a period to the mark-to-market, proprietary liquidity index for that artist during the same period, and subtracting the two figures. If an artist is over-performing their liquidity index, they will have a higher momentum than artists that are underperforming.

The compound annual return of artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s works, for instance, are 6% above her mark-to-market liquidity index, showing momentum for her art is on the rise, Moses says.

A goal of this website—which costs $125/year to access—is to allow everyday individuals to understand how to buy art, whether it’s an individual painting or a “share” in a painting that is done through fractionalized art platforms such as Masterworks.

“I wanted a broader market than the 100,000 folks that are potentially active in the auction market,” he says.

Write to Abby Schultz at abby.schultz@barrons.com