Dubai: Art is widely viewed as a high-profile investment. Art offers an alternative to park excess funds, which you might not want to put in the bank.
Analysts have often evaluated how art provides the highest long-term return of any asset class and enjoys the least dependency or correlation with traditional assets, which facilitates portfolio diversification. Tradable in different currencies, art also makes it easier to move funds.
As art has no inherent worth unlike gold or real estate, art valuation is subjective while prices are volatile. Some indices claim that art can give annualised returns of 10-12 per cent while others estimate it much lower at around 4 per cent.
Abdoune following his purchase of the painting. Photo: Sacha Jafri.
Inside a ballroom at the Atlantis Hotel on a manmade archipelago in Dubai, British artist Sacha Jafri made history. On March 24, he sold his work
The Journey of Humanity for $62 million, making it the second most expensive painting ever sold at auction by a living artist. The price isn’t the only grandiose part: at 17,000 square feet, the equivalent of four NBA-regulation basketball courts, the painting has claimed the Guinness World Record for the largest art canvas.
On a normal day in a normal year, such a mind-boggling price would immediately make waves around the world. But the sale came less than two weeks after an NFT by the digital artist Beeple fetched $69 million at Christie’s, and the art world seems only able to process one historic price fetched by one relatively unknown artist at a time.
The long-running grassroots public art project Art in Odd Places returns with an edition curated by Furusho von Puttkammer that questions the idea of a return to “normal” after the pandemic with works critiquing U.S. politics and the mythos of the American Dream. Projects will range from the outlandish to the poignant. Lawyer-turned-artist Tootsie Warhol will be in character as ex-president Donald Trump to complain about Kehinde Wiley outsourcing the creation of Obama’s official portrait to China, and anonymous British street artist “Blanksy” will appear in a white spandex suit that passersby are invited to spray paint with provided aerosols, while Sara Lynne Lindsay will pay tribute to the victims of the last pandemic, the 1918 Spanish flu, by carrying a billowing white dress in which she’s written their names in wax down 14th Street.
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In 2020, the 14th edition of Art Dubai went completely online due to the coronavirus outbreak, with programming focused on performance art and healing curated by Marina Fokidis, a live broadcast of the Global Art Forum, and a digital catalogue. “We didn’t have a model to follow,” Pablo del Val, Art Dubai’s Artistic Director explained. “The online viewing rooms came later and the art industry has shifted to make these platforms meaningful. The future was unknown so we worked blindly.”
The present, arguably, is no more certain. After an aggressive summer 2020 lockdown and a spike of coronavirus cases in the winter, Dubai has reopened as part of the government’s efforts to spur the trade and tourism that fuel its ailing economy, with speedy vaccine rollouts and approximately half the UAE’s population immunized. It’s no surprise then that Art Dubai 2021 focused its showcase around the theme of physical presence, with safety measures in place. The only digi