The Economist is playing around with art market data to create this chart plotting returns against the number of works sold. You’ll see that the categories they use aren’t the most helpful. Belgian paintings here is really the Magritte market, maybe a little Ensor too. To see how these raw numbers can be misleading, look at these average prices by artist which won’t help a buyer choose the right works from Dalí’s body of work that would be best positioned to appreciate:

But the $11m average fee for a Mark Rothko canvas might put you off, while a Jackson Pollock would set you back $2.5m. A more affordable purchase could be a Salvador Dali: with thousands of prints on sale, the average price of his work is a modest $19,000.

Art v stocks | 1843 (The Economist)