A stock exchange for art announced its launch in London, aiming to make art a more accessible investment prospect.

Called Artex, the new exchange — regulated by the Liechtenstein Financial Market Authority with an EU licence — opens with the listing of Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer” (1963), which Artex has valued at about $55mn. The work has been consigned by a private collector who bought it from Christie’s for $51.8mn with fees in 2017.

Artex will initially offer 70 per cent of the work (worth $38.5mn) in shares equivalent to $100 each, though more will come as its owner can only keep up to 10 per cent, confirms Yassir Benjelloun-Touimi, co-founder and chief executive of Artex and a former investment banker. Pre-marketing is set to begin officially on June 19 and public trading starts on July 21. Artex will take 3 per cent of the work’s valuation and will also make a “small fee” from each trade, Benjelloun-Touimi says. Other works will come to market, with their frequency “depending on the response”, he says.

This is not the first attempt to divide art into tradeable chunks — and so far the jury is still out on such projects, which have yet to attract enough liquidity to succeed and can invite shortlived speculation. Benjelloun-Touimi says that Artex’s regulated framework dictates “transparency and non-discrimination”, making it a viable option for institutional investors. He accepts that “art is not oil, it is not a commodity” and is committed to having the works Artex offers on view in public museums, rather than, for example, kept in a freeport. When it comes to speculation, he says, “you can limit it but you can’t stop it in any asset — it is ingrained in human nature”.

Source: Financial Times