Liquid Art
How an art collection is planning to IPO, and what that means for capital markets
Thomas Kaplan was sitting in front of a Rembrandt. Minerva in her Study, painted in 1635, the goddess of wisdom and war staring down at her book.
Kaplan had spent two decades amassing the world’s largest private collection of Dutch Golden Age paintings, including 17 Rembrandts, a Vermeer, and dozens of other Old Masters. And now he was staring at the problem every billionaire collector eventually faces: what do you do when your kids don’t want the inheritance? How do you access liquidity?
If you’ve read my core thesis here, you can probably guess where this is going. Kaplan came to the same conclusion: the public markets are the greatest source of asset liquidity that the world has ever seen.
Kaplan decided to take his art collection public. To carve Minerva into millions of tradable shares and IPO it on the New York Stock Exchange, next to Ford and Exxon and the HAUS ETF.
Used to be we broke down our portfolios into distinct buckets. Stocks in this bucket, bonds in that one. Cash goes here, emerging market allocations there. And for the daring, a little bucket called “alternatives”.
ETFs changed all that. ETFs are equities, technically speaking, but they represent the full array of investments. Suddenly corporate bonds could trade on stock exchanges. And commodities. And covered-call strategies. And merger arb. And carbon credits. And just about anything else.
Tokenization is the logical next step. Private real estate? Private credit? LP interests? Collectibles? It can all be tokenized with remarkable efficiency.
And it will be. As soon as we solve the Trust Layer. But I’m working on that, and you’ll be reading more about it soon.
Anyway, back to Project Minerva - Thomas Kaplan’s plan to IPO the largest private collection of Dutch Golden Age art as a public equity on the NYSE. Kaplan’s proposal would allow investors to buy shares of the rarest and most precious assets in cultural history.
I love this so much. Where art appraisers might have determined value in the past, or some obscene billionaire game of “look at me” during an auction, the free market now steps in. Buyers and sellers get to determine the true value of the assets. As it should be.
This is price discovery. And it is a gift from markets to the world. It is organic, and it works because people vote with their real dollars.
It’s coming to commercial real estate. As far as public market investors go, real estate has long lived in the alternative bucket. You have private real estate which is illiquid, opaque, and accessible through private partnerships or clunky public REITs. And then you have public REITs which managed to turn the exciting world of real estate investing into the most dull possible version of it, with well coiffed managers in suits and ties droning on about FFO and dividends. The market has voted on how it values that approach, and it ain’t pretty.
Tokenization is going to change all of that. It is going to offer fractional access, direct operating data, and automated deal execution. It’s going to make real estate investing sexy again.
This IPO is showing what the art version can look like: take something rare, illiquid, and inaccessible, and turn it into a tradable share with a narrative behind it.
The irony is that scarcity is what makes assets like Rembrandt valuable. But when you chop a masterpiece into hundreds of millions of tradable units, you democratize it without diluting its essence. You’re not buying paint on canvas. You’re buying exposure to scarcity itself, wrapped in liquidity. It’s worked for Bitcoin and it is going to work for these Rembrants.
We’re evolving as a market, past the world of stocks here, bonds there, alts at 2&20. We’re in a world where anything scarce and investable can be wrapped, fractionalized, and added to your portfolio.
And it’s not boring. It’s not another fund that gives you more-or-less beta with a better fund name. It’s different. It’s a share of cultural history that you can talk about at dinner. “I own a piece of Rembrandt” is infinitely more interesting than “I use a multifactor weighting strategy for my equity allocation”.
Project Minerva might be the first time a ticker symbol has an art soul. And that’s a market evolution worth getting excited about.