Move Over Wine and Classic Cars, Art is the New ‘IT’ Luxury Investment
A pair of record-breaking, and very different, portraits helped drive art to the top of the Luxury Investment Index in 2017, beating out perennial front-runners classic cars and investment grade wine along the way, according to The Wealth Report , produced by Douglas Elliman | Knight Frank Residential. The year’s top sale went to Leonardo Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi , a portrait of Christ that fetched a whopping $450 million at auction from an unnamed Middle Eastern buyer, smashing the previous world record of $179 million set by Picasso’s Women of Algiers in 2015. The year’s second biggest catch went to Japanese collector Yusaku Maezawawas, who snapped up Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled , a skull-like portrait rendered in slashes of color, for $110.5 million.