Observations By Sharon Lorenzo On The Art Market Today: Is It A Worthy Place For Investment? – Sharp Eye

Larry Gagosian, Owner of eighteen art galleries

Since I have been teaching art law and cultural heritage policy seminars for more than a decade at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, I find friends and family asking me about art as an asset class, and if it is a good place to invest their money. As I ponder the idea, I will share the following.  Unlike most financial markets, it is largely unregulated with the exception of some state laws about auction sales.  Art dealers and consultants are self- made with no training requirements.  Gallery owners, even those like Larry Gagosian, who owns 18 spaces worldwide, do so on their own and at their own risk.

My first piece of advice for buyers is to purchase what you love and want to live with in your home. In our family, we have collected work from our travels and mix same with family photos and memorabilia.  Since my studies in graduate school were in the areas of Spanish and Latin American art, we have a goal of acquiring one work from each of the 20 jurisdictions in Latin America and a few from Spain which we intend to donate to my college with our art library for student study. As the Spanish conquistadors brought artists with them in the colonial conquests of the Americas, the blend of styles is a fascinating study of cultural concurrence of color, design, iconography, and subject matter.

My second suggestion is that today there are three ways that art experts check the validity of a work of art to avoid acquiring a fake or forgery.

The first is called provenance research which is the study of the ownership history of a work of art. The new general counsel of the Metropolitan Museum of Art has recently hired a dozen art people to fill the files of their collection with all of the ownership data so that if a country of origin comes to request that a work be returned, the staff will know where it came from and when.

The second requirement is called connoisseurship, which requires the assemblage of Ph.D.’s in the field of art under consideration.  My favorite example of this was when the director of conservation at the Met Museum asked three scholars to blindfold themselves and when he said READY, they were to look at this work of art and vote yes or no as to whether it was a work by the famous Spanish artist Diego Velazquez. All three voted YES and it was relabeled as an authentic work of the master, not one of his students.

Self-portrait, Diego Velazquez, 1635.

The third requirement for authentication is called forensics, and this involves specialists who can analyze the paint, canvas, frames and often fingerprints present on a work of art. The FBI art crime laboratory is available to the auction houses as well as businesses such as Orion Analytical  (acquired by Sotheby’s) whose founder, James Martin, has a laboratory that looks like a hospital with microscopes and equipment for examination and testing.  In 2017, when the most expensive work of art of Leonardo Da Vinci called Salvator Mundi sold to the Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salam for $450 million dollars at Christie’s Auction House in New York, forensic testing found three fingerprints by Leonardo on the work which the auction house said was enough to authenticate it.  Some curators in the field claimed that Da Vinci often moved paint around with his fingers on works done by his students.  The Prince has the picture on his yacht and did not ask for a return of his money during the six years he had the legal right to do so.

Oil on canvas, Salvator Mundi, Leonardo da Vinci, 1499-1510.

While it is time consuming and costly to have all three of these tests performed, if the purchaser is putting up funds for a major investment, it is worth the cost to have all three done by art specialists.

I also have two examples to share of friends who have made enormous wealth from their art acquisitions.  The first was a neighbor in Houston who bought work by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, from the Blaffer Gallery exhibition on the University of Houston campus while I was working for the chancellor in 1981-1982.  Frida had passed away at the age of 54 in Mexico from blood poisoning after nails in her spine from an accident on her school bus as a teenager infected her.  She had done many self-portraits, and one showing her in bed called El Sueno, sold recently at a Sotheby’s auction on November 20, 2025, for $54.7 million dollars. My neighbor donated her Frida work entitled Moses, from 1945, to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston which according to current estimates would likely sell today for about $80 million dollars. My neighbor had paid $25,000 for it!

El Sueno, Frida Kahlo, 1940, oil on canvas.

Moses, Frida Kahlo, 1945, oil on canvas.

Another neighbor in New York who has assembled a major art collection with his wife paid about $2 million dollars for a late work by artist Mark Rothko.  In the estate of David Rockefeller sale of 2018, work by the same artist sold for $72.8 million for which Rockefeller had paid $10,000 in 1960.  This neighbor said to me, “Sharon, you can tell your students that some of my art investments have made more gains than any stock or bond I have ever owned. “

David Rockefeller and his Mark Rothko painting, 2007, White Center, oil on canvas.

My last example of how quixotic the art market can be is from my days in graduate school when one fellow student told us to see a major work of Latin American art in a prominent New York City art gallery by a Philadelphia artist who visited Cuba in 1864.  It was for sale for $150,000 which of course none of us could afford.  Six months later the gallery had not sold the work, and it ended up in a Sotheby’s Latin American art sale and sold for $20,000.  We all learned from this example to use the web site artnet.com to check auction sales before buying a work of art.  Clearly even the high-end galleries at Art Basel, TEFAF, and other fancy events mark up the price of their works to cover the costs of shipping, insurance and installations.

Santiago de Cuba, Edmund Darch Lewis, 1864, oil on canvas.

In closing, I am a big fan of the art world and have taken 40 classes while studying for my Ph.D. in Latin American art.  I am grateful to have had the chance to experience many aspects of the art market, and hope those interested will take the time to make wise and meaningful acquisitions, doing plenty of research ahead of time to verify all the data noted above.