Philip Hoffman Humble Brags the Art Market

Philip Hoffman cannot help but mention buying a Wade Guyton for $40,000 and selling it for three times the price but still flagellating himself for selling “too early.”  But that’s only the beginning of his bold claims. Although his talking points haven’t been updated—”art is a safe haven”—and Hoffan doesn’t explain to us what his firm is up to. They were an art fund. Then they switched to being advisors. Here he says they expect to have $1 billion under management in the future. Is that for an art fund? If not, is that the value of collections they manage?

Either way, Hoffman talks his book, whatever that may be. Meanwhile, Roubini asks some good questions about whether art is a good investment:

Talking about the Russians, a huge amount of their wealth is already out of oil, into London or New York, out of Moscow. Many Chinese have money outside of Hong Kong. The Middle East, still sitting on very large amounts of money.

If you look at Saudi Arabia, in Qatar, or Abu Dhabi , a small amount of their allocation of cash — it as a huge impact on the upside of art. We have been involved in the last two months in about $200 million of deals. Three deals of over $40 million. In that is unprecedented level for us.

We have seen assets coming our direction up from 10 years, 10,000,000 to nearly 400 million. We see that growing to about $1 billion, people looking to invest and hold off under our banner.

But i think people are going to be very selective. They will be super careful. They will be buying blue-chip artists like Francis Bacon, Picasso, Degas, Warhol, and they will shy away from lesser-known market.

Certainly Interesting Time to Invest in Art: Hoffman (Bloomberg)