Wine & Historic Cars Outpace Art

The Financial Times ran a little data on the luxury market to discover that Historic Autos and Wine remain strong even as the art market seems to have hit s bit of speed bump:

Camille Pisarro’s “Paysanne Bêchant (Peasant Woman Digging)” of 1882, a brightly coloured oil painting, had sold for $1.8m in New York in 2007, when the art market was reaching its most recent peak. But last month it failed to attract bids within its London estimate of £1.8m-£2.5m and remained unsold. Likewise, “The Sailboat”, a painting by Natalia Goncharova, the Russian cubo-futurist, did not reach the lower end of its estimated price of £2.5m-£3.5m (after a 2008 sale of £1.5m) […] The failure of these works to sell is perhaps not surprising, given that they were offered for auction at considerably higher prices than what they sold for at the market’s peak.

FT Wealth Indices: June 2011 (Financial Times)