I enjoyed reading this. It's a neat summary of so much that is shady about how the "fine art" world actually works.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast-tag/the-hidden-side-of-the-...
Hype for store of value is pretty close to market manipulation and should be treated similarly.
It won't, but it probably should.
After all, Hunter Biden's paintings netted up to ~$500,000 a piece and I can only imagine how good the return on investment was.
Let me buy this painting @ $500k and then donate it with a value of $1m, net $500k tax rebate.
So much of it is just shady shit using Art as a store of value.
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=202...
(There's a great deal of art and artifacts in museums and galleries around the world that have been donated "in lieu of taxation")
It also talks about how prices for art can be driven by a cycle of especially wealthy people being willing to pay large amounts of money for art.
> Because each donated work of art has a subjective value that is assessed by an appraiser and then after a period can be put back into the art market by the museum, art can be caught in a cycle of continuous increasing value, moving between private ownership and museums. When you take into consideration the exclusivity of the market and socio-economic factors that make the market highly responsive to high social standing and influence, which encourages selling art to the most high standing individuals and close business associates, we can see several financial and social results. First, we see that charitable deductions taken from art donations disproportionally benefit the wealthy while providing a benefit of subjective value to the receiving organization.
And that fact that people can donate their art to their own private museums (on their own property), with public access available at certain times of the year, by appointment.