Passionate investment in contemporary art, in the name of artistic value or value speculation?

Abstract

Art investment has become a popular alternative investment choice all over the world, among different kinds of art works, contemporary art work performes an espespecialy unsual price changes in the market, it’s hard to predict its price consistent with the value. Many contemporary art works even have unbelievable high prices beyond the public recognizations, which are criticised by the professionals sometime. It seems that the investors and the market start to chase some popular contemporary art works with fast and high profits than real valuable and artistic work. To have a better understanding of this phenomenon, this paper defines the internal and external factors of art work price, uses the hedonic pricing model to explain how factor affects the price of the art work, if internal factors affects the prices of the art work, any remaining discrepancies in prices will represent differences in the art work’s external factors. The paper will continue to discuss the potential external factors and reasons to occur their existences, and then give some suggestions to investors when choosing contemporary art works.