Combined, those knowledge assets support bespoke strategies and tactics to de-risk the buying and selling of art, also enabling traders in other markets for capital to enhance their own risk reduction efforts.
As the pioneer credited with initiating the discipline of art economics, the firm confronted historical challenges—long lead times for the development of bespoke client solutions where there were no prior models or templates; and accessing massive amounts of often hard-to-acquire, diverse data. These challenges, and others, lent themselves to an initial client base that had a distant investment horizon and recognized the long term value of adopting leading-edge invention. They understood instinctively that first-mover advantages in their extremely competitive marketplaces would be of generational duration.
In addition to countries that contain major art entrepôts and view the commerce in art as a strategic asset for generating national wealth—as discussed in the Background section of this website and at www.arteconomics.com—new clients are typically financial intermediaries such as hedge funds, asset managers and fiduciaries. They are often referred to the firm when high-stakes problems linked to art arise or, increasingly, when their principals begin losing sleep over deteriorating portfolios of non-art assets. In that instance, their goal is typically to gauge whether the 150 curatorial submarkets for art can provide fresh hedging strategies to lessen their risks in more traditional markets.
The firm has increasingly assumed a financial advisory role when clients—typically private equity firms—seek new or add-on investments within the art sector or in the adjacent luxury consumption arena. Family offices that own art collections, often with high concentrations of financial risk, have also sought strategies and trading tactics to reduce their interim vulnerabilities. Though highly diverse in their styles and priorities, family offices often share a similar goal: to develop uncrowded, de-risked exit routes to eventual liquidity that don’t distort prices in often thinly traded submarkets for art.
While such clients are enormously enjoyable and rewarding to work with, and will continue to be the firm’s mainstay, the accumulation of intellectual property indicates that it’s time to broaden the firm’s stance and generate a larger impact in the art sector and beyond. ARTWIRE is the vehicle to achieve that growth, but in a way that preserves the needs and prerogatives of historical clients and the development of similar bespoke relationships.