Long before M.F. Husain became India’s most celebrated modern painter, he was painting cinema hoardings in Mumbai, working for modest pay. In 2025, one of his canvases, Untitled (Gram Yatra), sold at Christie’s New York for roughly $13.8 million (over ₹110 crore), the highest price ever paid for a work of Indian modern art.
The paint, the canvas, and the frame were the same as in any other painting. What changed was the artist’s reputation, the work’s rarity, and its story. It also overtook the previous record, set by Amrita Sher-Gil’s The Story Teller, which sold for about ₹61.8 crore in 2023.
So how do canvas, pigment, and a frame become an asset class? And what can investors learn from a market where a signature and a story can add up to crores?
Where paintings get sold
Galleries (the primary market). This is where most living artists start. A gallery represents an artist, shows their work, and sells it to collectors. The usual split is roughly 50/50 between gallery and artist. Galleries also act as gatekeepers: they decide who gets the next piece from a hot artist, and sometimes buyers have to be ‘approved’ before they're offered one.
Auction houses (the secondary market). Christie's, Sotheby's, and Phillips in the West, and Saffronart and Pundole's in India, sell works that have already been owned before. This is where the record-breaking headlines come from. Prices are set in public by bidding.
Art fairs. Events like Art Basel or the India Art Fair put hundreds of galleries under one roof, and deals happen in days.
Private sales. Many high-value trades never reach the public. Advisers or auction houses quietly match a seller with a buyer, with no bidding and no published price.
Online platforms and direct sales. Artists now sell through Instagram, online marketplaces, and their own websites. This has opened the market to first-time buyers.
Stories that sound made up
The shredded Banksy: In 2018, Banksy's Girl with Balloon sold at Sotheby's for about £1 million. The moment the hammer fell, a hidden shredder in the frame cut the canvas into strips. You'd expect the value to collapse. Instead, the half-shredded work was renamed Love is in the Bin and resold in 2021 for around £18.6 million. The ‘damage’ made it worth far more.
The $450 million Leonardo: Salvator Mundi was once sold for a few thousand dollars as a work by a follower of Leonardo. After restoration and re-attribution, it sold at Christie's in 2017 for $450.3 million, still the highest price ever paid for a painting at auction. The lesson is that attribution is everything. The same canvas can be worth thousands or hundreds of millions depending on whose name goes on it.
Basquiat's skull: Jean-Michel Basquiat's untitled 1982 skull painting sold for $110.5 million in 2017 to Japanese collector Yusaku Maezawa. The work had sold decades earlier for a tiny fraction of that.
The digital twist: In 2021, Beeple's Everydays: The First 5000 Days, a digital collage, sold at Christie's for about $69 million as an NFT. Whatever you think of the NFT boom, it showed how far ‘what counts as art’ had stretched.
How a sale actually works
Consignment. The owner submits a painting to an auction house, which estimates its value and agrees on a reserve (the minimum price).
Authentication and provenance. Experts check the artwork's ownership history, condition, and authenticity. Gaps in provenance can sink a sale.
Marketing. Catalogues, previews, and tours of the work. Auction houses often secure a third-party guarantee promising a minimum price, which de-risks the sale.
The sale. Bidders compete in the room, by phone or online. The hammer price is only part of what changes hands.
Settlement. The buyer pays, the seller gets paid minus fees, and the work is shipped and insured.
The money side
Art is tempting to treat like a stock. Here is where the comparison gets interesting and where it breaks down. It's a big market. The global art market is estimated at roughly $60 billion a year, according to the annual Art Basel and UBS report, though it swings with the economy.
Costs are heavy. At auction, buyers typically pay a buyer's premium on top of the hammer price, often in the range of 20% or more. Sellers pay commissions too. Add insurance, storage, restoration, shipping, and taxes. A painting has to appreciate substantially just for you to break even. A stock trade, by contrast, costs a tiny fraction of a percent.
It's illiquid. You can sell a share in seconds. A painting can take months, and in a weak market it may not sell at all.
There's no dividend. A stock may pay dividends or grow earnings. A painting generates no cash flow. Your return depends entirely on someone later paying more.
Returns are uneven. Academic studies of art prices suggest long-term returns that are decent but generally trail equities once costs are included. Headline records come from a tiny number of ‘trophy’ works, and survivorship bias hides the thousands that quietly lost value.
New ways in. Fractional ownership platforms let people buy shares in a single painting, and banks now offer loans secured against art. These add accessibility but also fees, lock-ins, and less transparency.
Information is uneven. Stock prices are public and updated every second. Art prices are often private, and insiders know more than outsiders. That's the opposite of the level playing field markets are built on.
Stocks vs. Art
| Stocks | Art |
|---|---|
| Trades continuously on exchanges | Sells occasionally, deal by deal |
| Sold in seconds | Can take months to sell |
| Public, real-time prices | Opaque, often private prices |
| Low transaction costs | High fees, insurance, and storage |
| May pay dividends | No income |
| Identical units | Every work is unique |
| Core holding | Satellite holding |
Passion Asset or Smart Investment?
Art is best seen as a passion asset: something you buy because you love it, with any financial gain as a bonus. If you do treat it as an investment, keep it a small slice of a diversified portfolio, buy from reputable sources, insist on documentation, and budget for the costs. For most people, the liquid, transparent, low-cost route of listed markets remains the core of wealth building, and art is the colourful extra.
The same discipline applies in both worlds: know what you're buying, understand the costs, never confuse a headline price with your likely outcome, and don't invest money you can't leave untouched for years.
Start your smart investing on CubePlus and take control of your financial goals.
Disclaimer: The information provided in our blogs is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as financial, investment, or trading advice. Trading and investing in the securities market carries risk. Always conduct your own research and consult with a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decisions. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Copyrighted and original content for your trading and investing needs.
© 2026 — Tradejini. All Rights Reserved.
