Is art a good investment?

When worried about cheap cash eroding the value of fiat money and potential inflation, art is a real asset that investors turn to.

Like bricks and mortar, it's the tangibility and physical supply of fine art which gives it appeal as an investment class.

But, is it a good investment? According to one index, art has only returned 2% last year against a backdrop of global stocks rising by 10%. That was, of course, largely before the looming end of the era of cheap money.

Ben Bernanke signalled it last May, and the US Federal Reserve has begun to taper or cut back its cash injections from this month.

Yet, the most expensive piece of art ever sold was a Francis Bacon painting for more than $142m (£86.8m) last year. And, it's not classical pieces but rather those contemporary and modern art made since 1875 which are the largest part of the global art trade, accounting for nearly 70%.

It's also a sizeable global market amounting to around $60bn annually. Buyers from China vie with the US and the European Union as the biggest buyers, each accounting for about one-third of the market.

I met light artist Chris Levine, whose portrait of the Queen was on the cover of TIME magazine, to find out how the global market in art is doing.