Nobody Loves Their Microsoft Stock: Mark Bell & Josh Baer on Art & Value at Atlanta Art Fair

Mark Bell is Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Family Office Solutions at Balentine, which manages around $9.5 billion for 300 families, and for a long time has taught a course at Emory on art as an emerging asset class. He thinks art is a financial asset. Josh Baer, forty years into watching collections get built and dispersed, does not.

Recorded on the opening day of Atlanta Art Fair, this is a conversation about what art is worth and what kind of thing it is. Bell makes the case for a complex asset with a consumptive component — nobody loves their Microsoft stock, but almost nobody buys art without loving it. Josh's answer is that the loving is exactly what makes it something other than an asset.

Atlanta Art Fair runs October 1–4, 2026 at Pullman Yards. For more information, visit theatlantaartfair.com. Recorded October 1, 2026, in partnership with Atlanta Art Fair.

00:00 Atlanta on the fair calendar, and what it means for the Southeast

04:10 Buying without seeing: PDFs, the pandemic, and Teterboro airport

06:07 Is art a financial asset?

07:59 Fractionalization, and why nobody wants one-eighth of a Ferrari

10:02 Where the returns actually are: Basquiat, British Rail, Yale

13:03 Buy what you love — and what wealth management missed for decades

16:21 Store of value, transaction costs, and the case for an opaque market

19:52 AI, authentication, and the artists he'd point you to