Included in Bloomberg’s story about Irving Blum’s complete set of Warhol soup cans returning to Los Angeles (on loan from MoMA) for the first time in nearly 50 years are these numbers on the Warhol market from Artnet:

From 1988 to 2010, Warhol artworks overall trailed both the Standard & Poor’s 500 and an index of 50 contemporary artists, delivering a 255 percent return versus 395 percent for stocks and 455 percent for the contemporary artists, according to Artnet Worldwide.

Amy King, a vice president at Artnet, attributed that to the fact that Warhol produced so many works, many of them of lower value.

Warhol’s other Soup Cans from the Ferus Gallery period have beaten the market and his peers recently, delivering a 2,560 percent return since 1996, Artnet data show.

Warhol’s $100 Soup Earned Dealer $15 Million, Returns to L.A. (Bloomberg)