密苏里州堪萨斯城的房地产开发商里德·希科克（Reed Hickok）花了几个月的时间观看他的股票，债券和房地产投资被切碎。One holding, though, hasn’t caused him grief: American Masters Collection I, a fund that owns a portfolio of 20th-century art by painters such as Frank Stella, whose canvases radiate with rainbowlike patterns, and sculptors such as Deborah Butterfield, known for fashioning horses out of discarded wood.
The fund’s appraised value as of December 2008 is up some 20 percent, to about $13 million, since Hickok invested in spring 2007. “When I saw the Dow plunging, I was happy that I didn’t have that money in stocks,” says Hickok, 44, one of about 85 investors in the open-end fund managed by a Kansas City firm. That’s up from 35 investors at the end of 2007, says Alexander (Sandy) Kemper, chairman of the Collectors Fund, which manages American Masters, and the CEO of Kansas City’s UMB Bank from 1996 to 2000.
大多数投资者不会涉足艺术品，但随着股票可能会发生变化。根据MEI Moses All-Art指数的数据，2008年的艺术市场仅占4.5％，该指数基于拍卖销售，是由前纽约大学财务教授Jianping Mei和Michael Moses开发的。这远低于标准普尔500指数去年的37％诺言。
但是直接购买艺术是有风险的。这一事实引起了新的艺术基金，尽管这些有限的合作伙伴关系在替代资产空间中仍然是一个很小的利基市场 - 摩西估计自2004年以来投资了不到10亿美元。years ago and had assets of about $120 million as of last October, doesn’t disclose returns, but manager Philip Hoffman, a former finance director at Christie’s auction house, says it has made an average of 30 percent on every work of art sold from its inception in 2004 through September 2008.
这些资金利用其合并的购买力来购买艺术品，理想情况下以苦恼的价格捕获Alpha。Beta来自基于独立专家的季度评估的资产赞赏。资金的融资反映了对冲基金的资金 - 许多资金的最低投资为25万美元，收费结构为2和20。
投资艺术也涉及风险。一些较早的资金已经关闭，例如ABN AMRO ART基金会在推出一年后于2005年关闭。为了避免这种风险，2007年8月浮动的1,020万美元的资产管理艺术交易基金采用了对冲策略，涉及卖空奢侈品消费者股票，这将其视为艺术市场的代理。创始人贾斯汀·威廉姆斯（Justin Williams）指出：“如果它可以维持这一水平，那么Art的表现就超过了市场的大幅度。”“我们可以管理不利的一面。”