[intro]Q4 Increase of 13.1% Reverses Art Market Swoon but Is Insufficient to Avert a Decrease of 23.5% for the Year in the Mei Moses® All Art Index[/intro]

Michael Moses called to ask why we had a bias against his index based on a few posts citing methodological questions about the index. AMM’s position is that any index has limitations that should be explored an acknowledged but the Mei Moses is as good a gauge of the overall art market as any that exists already. To underscore that point, we were happy to post the 2009 Year-End release from Prof. Moses’s firm. A quote is below:

The 2009 decrease in the return of the Mei Moses® All Art index of approximately 23.5 percent is the largest decline in the all art index since the 1991 decline of 38.7 percent. The 38.7% decline occurred after the bursting of the last art bubble of 1985-1990.  The 23.5% was also the second largest decline since the great depression.  The declines of 2008 and 2009 occurred after five years of positive annual growth averaging almost 20 percent.  The 2009 decline of the all art index was particularly depressing given the substantial year to date results of most other financial assets.  As an example the year to date (12/18/2009) value of the S&P 500 total return index (where dividends are reinvested tax free) had a gain of almost 23% over its 2008 year end value.  However the most recent ten and five year compound annual returns (CAR) for art, 5.5% and 3.3%, substantially exceed the returns of stocks, -1.3% and -0.1% respectively.   Stocks outperformed art over the last twenty five years with a CAR of 10.4 percent compared to 6.5 percent for art.  However, for the last fifty years the returns were very close with art achieving a CAR of 8.9% compared to the 9.4% for equities.

You can download the rest in pdf form here: Mei Moses 2009 Year-End Alert