Georgina Adam reports that SplitArt has filed for bankruptcy taking €5m of capital with it and marking another attempt at financializing art that has not worked out. Though similar-sounding schemes for trading art shares have been established in Asia and France, none have yet to prove successful:
This ambitious but controversial attempt to create the world’s first “stock exchange for art” ended in liquidation in the Luxembourg courts at the end of last year. The project, which at one point employed 18 people, aimed to turn art into a fungible asset by splitting it into “certificates”, which could then be traded on an exchange. Most of the funding came from an Israeli source, and Deloitte Luxembourg, which has an active art and finance service, helped to promote it but without investing in it. The idea was that the owner of a work of art would put it into SplitArt, which would convert it into “certificates” tradable on an online multinational trading facility. But the project ran aground after a split (!) between investors about its direction. One minority investor said: “The majority wanted to build an IT platform and stock exchange to make money, but the minority saw the project as a way of creating a new transparent, liquid, efficient market.”
The Art Market: Bid to Save the Planet (Financial Times)