Is Art a Good Investment? An Honest Market Analysis
By Njeri Wachira · 27 June 2026 · 4 min read
The clearest real data point for East African art as an investment is the November 2025 Art Auction East Africa result — here's what an 80% sell-through rate and a record-setting top lot actually tell you, and what they don't.
The honest answer is: sometimes, for the right work, bought the right way — and the best evidence for that is one real auction, not a general claim about "the market."
The one data point worth actually looking at
On 5 November 2025, Strauss & Co partnered with Danda Jaroljmek's Art Auction East Africa — an initiative running since 2013 — to hold the first Art Auction East Africa | Strauss & Co, a live-and-online sale at Circle Art Gallery in Nairobi. Around 65 lots of modern and contemporary work from artists across roughly ten countries went under the hammer. The result: close to an 80% sell-through rate, total sales of KES 29.6 million (about $229,727), and over 45% of buyers were new to the auction. The top lot, Tanzanian modernist K.F. Msangi's 1968 painting Baobab Under the Red Moon, sold for KES 3,522,000 (about $27,271) — more than double its pre-sale estimate.
That's a genuinely strong single result: a high sell-through rate signals real buyer demand rather than an auction house struggling to move inventory, and a top lot doubling its estimate is a specific, verifiable sign that collectors were willing to pay up for the right work. It's also the reason Strauss & Co is running a second edition on 28 October 2026, with a dedicated section built around Msangi's estate.
What one auction can't tell you
One result — even a strong one — is not a market index. There's no equivalent here of a stock market's daily price history to check whether East African art appreciates reliably over five or ten years; this auction is, by the organisers' own framing, an attempt to build that kind of track record, not proof it already exists. The buyers paying above estimate for a historically significant modernist work like Msangi's are also not a signal about how a living, early-career artist's work will resell — those are different risk categories, and this guide won't collapse them into one number.
The realistic case for and against
The case for: East African modern and contemporary art has verifiably found real buyers at real prices, including new-to-the-market buyers, and Nairobi's gallery infrastructure — Circle Art Gallery (founded 2013, moved to a larger space in 2023), the GoDown Arts Centre, Kuona Trust, One Off Contemporary — gives that demand somewhere to be discovered and sold. Historically significant work by artists with an established exhibition record, like Msangi and fellow Tanzanian modernist Sam Ntiro, has shown it can set real benchmarks at auction.
The case for caution: by most outside accounts — ArtReview among them — Nairobi's art market, while growing, isn't yet at the scale or liquidity of Lagos's or Cape Town's. A young, un-established secondary market means fewer comparable sales to price against, which cuts both ways: real upside if a career takes off, real risk that a resale simply doesn't find a buyer at any price, because the buyer pool for a specific artist may still be thin.
What this means if you're actually deciding
Buy work you'd want on your wall even if it never resells — that's the position every honest guide to buying art eventually lands on, and it's not a dodge here either. If you do want the closest thing to an evidence base, the most useful thing to check before buying is whether a specific artist has an actual auction or resale record you can point to — Msangi and Ntiro now do, most living Kenyan and East African artists don't yet, and that absence isn't a red flag on the work, just a fact about how new this secondary market still is.
This is a read of one real, named event, not investment advice — art isn't a regulated financial product in Kenya, and nobody can promise you a return on a painting. If you're weighing a significant purchase specifically as an investment, a decision that size deserves an art advisor or valuer who can look at the specific piece, not a journal article.
— Njeri Wachira
Source: Strauss & Co, "Tanzanian modernists shine in the inaugural Art Auction East Africa," and the Art Auction East Africa organisers' own site (artauctioneastafrica.com).