"Art's roughly a one and a half trillion dollar asset class, venture and private equity is $3.5 trillion... there's only us that provide investment products in art." - Scott Lynn, CEO, Masterworks

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Takeaways

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• Scott's journey in art investment began early. He found success at a young age which led him to invest in art, beginning with a Marc Chagall painting.
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• He highlights the value of art as an alternative investment, noting its history of returns, particularly in the contemporary art segment. He discusses how art offers unique advantages, being non-correlated with traditional financial markets and providing a hedge against inflation.
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• He believes that art is an attractive option for diversifying investment portfolios and seeking alpha outside of conventional investment avenues.
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• He states that art appreciation is correlated with the recency of the work and emphasizes the importance of selecting the right artists. He notes that not all famous artists' works are equally valuable.
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• He expresses a cautious view of certain investment classes like real estate and crypto. He finds real estate not as compelling due to its dependency on leverage, which can lead to binary outcomes, and he's become more bearish on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies due to their lack of developed use cases and high correlation with public equities.

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Bio

Scott Lynn is a serial entrepreneur and passionate art collector. He is the Founder and CEO of Masterworks.io, a platform making it possible to invest in multimillion-dollar works from artists like Banksy, Kaws, Basquiat, and more. In 2021 the platform reached unicorn status. In 2014, Scott founded Payability, a digital lending provider. Scott has been an active collector of contemporary art for more than fifteen years and has built an internationally-recognized collection of Abstract Expressionism that has included works by Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and more. In addition to Masterworks, Scott serves on the board of v2 ventures, Payability, and the Brooklyn Rail.

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Full Transcript

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