Art-Flipping Speculators Boost the Young Artist Market

Kour Pour, a 26-year-old Los Angeles painter, is such a hot prospect in the art world that his first solo exhibition sold out even before the show opened last month in New York. Buyers snapped up all seven of Pour’s 8-foot-tall canvases, which depict Persian rugs and were priced at $15,000, according to Joel Mesler, co-owner of the Untitled Gallery, where the show runs through Feb. 23. Mesler says he received unsolicited offers from buyers willing to pay significantly more. “There’s a tremendous amount of speculation in the market right now, particularly for emerging artists,” says Todd Levin, director of the New York-based Levin Art Group, who has advised collectors for more than 25 years. “It is more ferocious than it’s ever been.”

Art flipping has picked up as collectors chase works by up-and-coming artists with the intention of reselling them quickly, a sign there may be a bubble in the contemporary art market. From 2011 through 2013, the number of works three years old and under that sold at auction topped 7,300 annually, compared with 4,023 in 2007 when the art market was peaking, according to research firm Artnet Worldwide.