A French established trading platform was launched in London to provide public access to artwork stock shares.

Noosa, Queensland -- (SBWire) -- 04/14/2014 --My Art Invest, a French simplified stock company, was launched in Shoreditch, London on April 10, 2014. The company aims to provide art collectors an online trading platform which will allow the public to buy and sell shares of masterpieces by renowned street artists for as low as 5 pounds ($8). The organizers mentioned that 6,000 customers received an average return of 30% in France in the past three years.

Tom-David Bastok, the company’s 25-year-old French founder, revealed, “we are thrilled to have opened the gallery in the UK after such tremendous success in France. My Art Invest was created with the vision of making buying art something that isn’t reserved for the financial elite. Through our unique trading platform we hope to change the way that people engage with art by giving them the freedom to take ownership over works that they enjoy without needing to spend their entire life savings.”

A buyer who gains a quarter of the shares in any artwork may take it home for 90 days, or a quarter of a year. Many individuals among the young, artsy crowd loved the concept. The others regarded the idea as a step close to “commoditization” of culture.

Commencing prices are specified by My Art Invest and are based on the market value. The more costly a piece is, the more shares are given out. The owners can list the shares on the gallery’s secondary exchange for resale at any price they wish once the original offer is completed and the rest of the shares are bought.

The platform does not keep track nor manage investments. Instead, it selects auction websites, like eBay to enable market forces to participate. Bastok stated, “we are not a financial market but we try to be a cultural market.”

The founder recounted spending his youth tagging along with his mother at art shows wherein they would buy canvases and paint to replicate their favorite art pieces. He divulged the idea came up from his two favorite things, art and finance. Bastok was studying finance at Paris’ Ecole Supérieure de Gestion et Finance when he formed the concept. He founded the enterprise in Paris in 2011.

The exchange traded a Jeff Koons sculpture called “Blue Balloon Dog” in France. The shares started at 55 euros each which later went up to 200 euros. “Rome Pays Off” by Jean-Michel Basquiat was also traded and shares gathered rose from 200 euros to 350 euros. Bastok pointed out that the average appreciation is fairly small at 30 percent in a period no longer than three years. According to My Art Invest, it measures up to about 4 percent over a period of five to ten years in art investing.

According to a report by the European Fine Art Foundation, the international art market reached $65.9 billion last year. It increased by 8 percent and became the highest since 2007.

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Blue Horizon Prints are a premium quality seller of canvas prints & photos on canvas. They offer a great variety of canvas art based products such as stretched canvas prints, gallery wrapped or un-stretched Canvas Prints, framed prints as well as archival prints. The canvas art shop offers a collection of Banksy prints, panoramic art, tram scrolls, Star Wars art, vintage posters, modern and abstract art, to mention some.