Painting a pretty picture

“Religion doesn’t resonate with a lot of people anymore, and art is filling the gap for many of them,” says Bijan Khezri, chief executive of the Artist Pension Trust (APT). “The audience has changed consistently all over the world. We are now seeing young, successful professionals who regard art as central to their sense of self, art with a story behind it.” When Mr Khezri talks about art with a story behind it, he does not mean narrative paintings. A young, contemporary art collector with an investment banking pedigree, he sees himself as part of a generation with globalised identities, looking to art as a vital medium for self-fashioning and definition. That translates into a desire to build a lifestyle around the world’s art circuits and participate in the career development of particular artists. “A growing number of new young collectors are coming along with strong business acumen,” agrees Randall Willette of Fine Art Wealth Management. But it is difficult to make sound investments in the volatile arena of contemporary art, where practitioners often have very little auction track record. “Art is an asset class, but you should not approach it with an investor’s mindset,” warns Mr Khezri. “You have to believe in the artists and their work.” Nonetheless. APT has made a new investment advisory service, APT Intelligence, available to a select group of clients ahead of a general launch in September – and as one of the largest and certainly the most globalised collections of emerging and mid-career artists in the world, contemporary art is precisely where its expertise is harnessed. APT is a long-term investment programme into which around 250 participants will invest 20 works of art over a 20-year period. The trust stores, leases for exhibition and eventually sells these works, with 40 per cent of profits going back to the individual artist, 32 per cent going to the collective participants and 28 per cent going to APT itself. A 50-strong, region-specific curatorial committee of experts are retained to select participants, and they look for artists with “growth potential,” says Mr Khezri. That means ambitious artists with a career track record of good decision-making with regard to exhibiting with appropriate galleries and selling into the right collections. This curatorial team will also work for APT Intelligence, and is being rapidly augmented by an additional 50 experts who will not work for the trust itself. Users will be able to log on to the APT Intelligence website, define their intelligence query in terms of geographical region, medium and price range and wait for the system to match it with a number of appropriate expert curators. They then get to speak with the expert on the telephone, paying for half-hour intervals, or even tour the world’s art hotspots with them. “So let’s say you’re going to Beijing tomorrow and you want to understand the young contemporary art scene there,” says Mr Khezri. “You can have a curator take you around not only the galleries but also the artists’ studios.”

Khezri: you have to believe in the artists