With an odd sense of enthusiasm, Canada’s Telegraph-Journal has a story on buying art as an investment:

The Canadian art market had been enjoying a particularly bullish run for about a year-and-a-half when the financial crisis hit, with 16 works going for more than $1 million at auction in the last year-and-a-half. The 2007-2008 season saw record sales in auction houses totalling $71 million, up about nine per cent from $65 million the previous year.

“It has grown a lot over the past 10 years,” David Silcox, president of Sotheby’s Canada and an expert in historic and contemporary Canadian art, said from Toronto recently. “There have been a lot of new collectors come in, there has been a lot of prosperity, a lot of people with money have gotten interested in the art.”

Canada’s big three auction houses – Heffel, Sotheby’s and Joyner Waddington’s – have been buoyed by sales of the blue chip Canadian artists that created the market in the first place. These include members of the Group of Seven, Emily Carr and David Milne, whom James Adams of the Globe and Mail collectively refers to as “the backbone of the high-end auction scene in Canada” since it emerged in the 1960s.

And even with the economic problems that emerged this Fall, the story still seems bullish:

While the Dow keeps to the roller-coaster path it has been on since the U.S. housing market bottomed out in October, and emaciated stock portfolios show no signs of thickening anytime soon, Canadian art, including some works by prominent East Coast painters, is looking like an investment safe haven.

Banking on Art (Telegraph-Journal)