A joint venture between Art Market Research and Castlestone Management has created a new art index specialising in post-war artists and genres, highlighting continued investor interest in this sector.

Art Market Research, the creator of the AMR Art 100 Index, has collaborated with the Collection of Modern Art, a mutual fund run by Castlestone that owns a range of museum-quality art from the last 100 years including Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol. Together they have launched the AMR Post-War Art 50 Index.

“We are creating, in a sense, the world’s first passive art investment tracker fund, focusing on the post-war genre…We hope that this will give investors more confidence that art, and our fund, is an investable, analysable asset class, just like any other,” said Constanze Kubern, senior art advisor at the Collection of Modern Art.

The creators of the index hope that it will present art as a quantifiable and pragmatic choice for asset managers. Like the existing AMR Art 100 index, the new index will use a database of art auction results to analyse trends in the post-war art. Moreover, by focusing on artists with established reputations who have ceased producing work, the index hopes to insulate itself from the speculative influences that effect the contemporary market.

Although the market will fluctuate like any other it is hoped that, using proven artists from a specific genre, art pieces will be more tradable.

“We are interested in investing in artists with established reputations, which will respond to economic factors like other irreplaceable real assets such as gold over the long term. Old Masters and Impressionists would offer some of these characteristics, but because of the price of individual pieces, it would prove less liquid…We could buy one Old Master for several million, or for the same money we could buy ten museum-quality pieces from different Post-War artists, all with established reputations, reducing the risk of any one piece,” added Mr Kubern.

London-based Art Market Research has created 500 indices since 1985 and is used by Christie’s and Sotherby’s auction houses. US-based Castlestone is an independent fund manager specialising in alternative asset classes.