Fractional (co-)ownership of art

At Art Part Club, from a few hundred crowns. The club buys a curated work directly, which guarantees its authenticity, and arranges its management, insurance and safe storage in a depository, while you hold your share. This is exactly what lowers the barrier to entry and opens the world of collecting to a younger generation, for whom a whole canvas would be out of reach.

The basic logic is simple: after a few years the work is sold, at auction or privately, and the proceeds are divided among the shareholders in proportion to their shares. You do not have to wait for that final sale, though — the club is building its own marketplace where a share can be offered on sooner. Art is a long-distance run and no return is guaranteed, which makes it all the more important that throughout, you co-own a real work and not just a promise.

No investment in art is risk-free and a share is no exception: it carries the same risks as the whole work — forgeries, shifts in fashion, the artist's own fate. The greatest weakness of collecting tends to be liquidity: a work may rise on paper, but until you sell it, that rise is of no use to you. The fractional model eases that weakness precisely because a share appeals to a far wider circle of buyers than one expensive canvas. So treat art as a complement to a portfolio, not as a sure bet.

An art fund (in the Czech Republic, a qualified investors' fund, or FKI) buys and manages an entire collection for you, but has a high barrier to entry: with Czech funds such as Artefin or Proart, the sums start at one and three and a half million crowns respectively. Fractional ownership, by contrast, lets you buy a share in one specific work from small amounts. Put simply: a fund is a ready-made package for large investors, while a fraction is a ticket for anyone who wants to start small.