One of the more intriguing ideas I have come across in my 10 years of blogging is the Artist Pension Trust which has artists deposit their work into across the course of 20 years with the proceeds of the sales going to fund their pensions.
When I first wrote about this back in 2006, I didn’t have too many of the details, but a recent story examining the success of the trust as it reaches its 10 anniversary provides many more details.
I was interested to learn that only 20% of the 2000 participating artists were from the United States. Though given that the number one rule of investment is diversification, I shouldn’t be surprised.
Basically, it works this way:
Participating artists donate 20 of their works over a planned 20-year period (two per year during the first five years, one per year for the ensuing five years and one piece every other year for the remaining 10 years) to the trust. There are regional directors and selection committees, consisting of independent curators, artists and collectors but not dealers (“they bring a conflict of interest,” Moti Shniberg, a former high-tech entrepreneur and the chief executive officer of Mutual Art, the parent company of the Artist Pension Trust, said).
The trust “cultivates” the investment by lending them to museums and art festivals. Keeping them locked in storage for 20 years wouldn’t help enhance their value, after all. While the plan is to keep the works for 20 years, some have already been sold when their value increased significantly.
Other artists have withdrawn and asked for their art to be sold when they were short on money.
While the ideal of pooling art for the long term benefit of all is admirable in theory, in practice human nature caused the trust to slightly alter their original plan.
“David Ross noted that his original idea was for all the proceeds of sales of artwork be placed in the general pool, but a number of the artists he had approached, “who all believed that they were going to be successful in their careers,” were unenthusiastic about supporting less accomplished colleagues. “Dividing the profits—40 percent for the artist, 32 percent for the general pool—made the idea easier for them to swallow.”
As noted earlier, there are no dealers on the committees because they have a vested interest in selling an artist’s work rather than letting it be deposited in a trust for 20 years.
I look forward to checking in again on this in 10 years when the trust starts to sell the works of the first depositors in preparation for paying out pensions. How well will those artists who have been had the patience and discipline to participate in this program fare?