Assets in the eye of the beholder

He may be a business-savvy art connoisseur with a scholar’s comprehension of modern Arab art, a buyer for the London-based Fine Art Fund Group and a founder of Lebanon’s Agial gallery, but Saleh Barakat will gladly “kick people out the door” if he is asked to tip them on the next big art investment. “The word [investment] irritates me,” he said. His is a love of art for art’s sake. But Barakat probably realizes, just as much as anyone who has tapped into Middle Eastern art recently, that the market is following a global trend away from volatile stock markets, and into “passion” investments. “Financial markets are shifting from a multi-decade cycle of being overexposed to paper assets, toward a new cycle of investing in real assets such as real estate, gold, silver and collectibles such as art and diamonds that have no expiry date,” said Khaled Samawi, owner of