Investing in Prints and Editions

On October 17, 2025, Sotheby’s London sold seventeen pictures that David Hockney had drawn on an iPad in the spring of 2011, walking the lanes near Bridlington in East Yorkshire. Each was a print from the series The Arrival of Spring, in an edition of 25 (or 10 for the largest format), inkjet on paper, signed and numbered. The low estimate for the group was £1.7M. The seventeen made £6.21M ($8.35M), and all but one lot cleared its high estimate. The picture dated February 19, 2011 sold for £762,000 against a high estimate of £180,000: more than four times the guide, and £258,000 above the series’ previous record of £504,000, set at Phillips in March 2022 (both prices with fees). Earlier in 2025 the same works had been changing hands privately at £180,000 to £230,000 (Sotheby’s; Artnet News; HENI; Geist, a dealer in the series; MyArtBroker).

Two years before that, a different corner of the same market had been going the other way. Banksy’s prints, published in signed and unsigned editions by a Bristol screenprint shop for a few hundred pounds each in the 2000s, had turned over £35.2M at auction in 2021. In 2023 the figure was £6M, a fall of more than 80%, with the average price down 31% in a single year on top of a 21% drop the year before (MyArtBroker Banksy market reports, 2023 and 2026). Nothing about the prints had changed. The buyers had.

Those two stories are the whole of this guide. An edition is a fixed number of identical objects with a public price history, which makes it the one corner of fine art where an ordinary buyer can see what things are worth before bidding. The same transparency means the crowd sees it too, and a print market can double and halve inside four years without a single unique work being involved. What follows is how the objects are made and numbered, what the paper does to the price, what seven artist markets have done since 2021, what the venues charge, how the fakes are made and caught, what the tax code does to the gain, and a round trip in dollars. The flagship guide, Investing in Fine Art, covers the wider market, the academic return record, the auction mechanics and the fractional platforms; this one stays on the paper.

No independent, investable index of print prices exists. Artprice, Art Basel and UBS, and the auction houses report totals; MyArtBroker, a London prints dealer, publishes the only artist-by-artist turnover series, built from public hammer prices (the hammer is the winning bid, before the buyer’s premium is added). The one academic repeat-sale series is old: James Pesando built an index of modern prints at auction from 1977 to 1992 and put the real return at 1.51% a year, 2.10% for Picasso’s prints (American Economic Review, 1993), and nobody has extended it the way Dimson and Spaenjers or Mei and Moses extended the painting series. What the reader gets is a set of totals that describe the size of the pool and a set of artist-level series that describe what the water has been doing.

The pool is large by lot count and small by value. In 2025, prints, multiples and editions accounted for 198,100 of the lots sold at fine-art auctions worldwide, 23% of all transactions, for a combined $526M and an average price of about $2,600 (Artprice, The Art Market in 2025, published March 10, 2026). The year before, the same publisher counted 193,000 prints and $473M. Across the whole fine-art auction market the median lot sold for $600 in 2025 ($610 in 2024); 1,347 lots of all kinds cleared $1M, and only thirty of them were prints.

The global art market was worth about $59.6B in 2025 (Art Basel and UBS, March 2026), so the print auction sector is under 1% of the trade by value and close to a quarter of it by number: it is where most of the objects are and almost none of the money. Dealers see a bigger share: the Art Basel and UBS 2026 report put prints and multiples at 12% of dealer sales by value in 2025, against 59% for paintings.

The comparison worth carrying in your head is with the blue-chip index. The Artprice100, which tracks the hundred best-selling artists at auction, rose 11.2% in 2025; the two year-end levels are the first series on our own tape, described in Our tape below. Print markets in the same year did not follow. Banksy’s hammer total rose 6% to £5.4M, Kusama’s fell 15% to £4.91M, and Hirst’s fell 16% to £2.1M (MyArtBroker, 2026). An index of trophy paintings and a basket of editions are different assets, and the year the index recovered is the year several print markets kept falling.

For the honest return, the best available evidence is the full cycle of a single market, and the Banksy series is the cleanest because one dealer has tracked it lot by lot for a decade. Its shape is a rise of 106% in 2019 and 250% in 2020, a peak in 2021, a fall of 57% in net sales in 2023 with the average selling price down 31%, and a plateau at about a sixth of the peak from 2024 (MyArtBroker). A buyer who bought a signed print in 2021 and sold in 2025 lost money before fees; one who bought in 2018 and sold in 2025 made money before fees. The return on editions is a cycle-timing return more than a scarcity return.

Against that, the S&P 500 returned about +313% with dividends over the ten years to August 31, 2026 (S&P Dow Jones Indices data, used across this hub), and the flagship guide puts fine art’s real long-run return at about 2.4% a year before costs; Pesando’s print index sat below even that. Prints have not been shown to beat paintings over long windows, and neither has been shown to keep pace with equities.

An original print is an image the artist made to be produced in multiples, by carving, etching, drawing on stone or cutting a screen, and printed in a fixed number of impressions, each an original work rather than a copy of one. A poster is a photograph of something else. The distinction is the first line of the price, and the vocabulary that follows is what a catalogue entry is telling you.

The edition size is the number of impressions the artist declared, and it is written on each sheet as a fraction: 34/250 is the thirty-fourth numbered impression of 250. The number on the left does not matter; a low number is not worth more, whatever a dealer says, because impressions in a modern edition are printed together and numbered afterwards. The number on the right matters enormously.

Outside the numbered edition sit the artist’s proofs (AP, or EA for épreuve d’artiste), usually 10% of the edition, retained by the artist; the printer’s proofs (PP); the hors commerce proofs (HC, not for sale, used as samples); the bon à tirer (BAT, the single impression the artist approved as the standard); and, at the top of the hierarchy, trial proofs and unique variants, which are one-offs and trade closer to drawings. APs sell at a modest premium to the numbered edition in a healthy market, a wider one in a hot market, and none in a correction.

The signature is the second price line. Andy Warhol’s 1967 Marilyn Monroe portfolio was published in an edition of 250 plus 26 lettered artist’s proofs, signed on the verso (the back of the sheet); Banksy’s Girl with Balloon was issued in 2004 by Pictures on Walls in 150 signed and 600 unsigned impressions, plus 88 artist’s proofs in four colourways (Feldman and Schellmann; Pictures on Walls records as carried by Guy Hepner and MyArtBroker). In 2025 a signed Banksy print averaged £35,000 at auction against £12,000 for an unsigned one; in 2023, 83 signed prints made about £4.9M while 127 unsigned made £3.5M (MyArtBroker, 2024 and 2026). Same image, same year, same paper, a third of the price, because the signature is the only thing on the sheet a photograph cannot reproduce.

The third line is the difference between an original print and an authorised reproduction. The notorious case is the 1970 Sunday B. Morning Marilyn set, printed by two Belgian publishers from Warhol’s original negatives and colour codes, unsigned, with a black verso stamp reading “Fill in your own signature”; the 1970 black-stamp set is listed in the Feldman and Schellmann catalogue, later Sunday B. Morning reprints are not, and both are still offered to buyers who do not read the stamp. They trade for a small fraction of the six figures a signed 1967 sheet commands. If the sheet is not in the catalogue raisonné, the scholarly list of an artist’s authentic works, as an impression from the declared edition, it is not the asset the catalogue price describes.

Every serious print is priced against a reference number in its catalogue raisonné, and the number does more work in the print world than anywhere else in art, because there are many identical objects to match against it. Warhol’s prints carry Feldman and Schellmann numbers (the Marilyn portfolio is F&S II.22 to II.31, one number per colourway, or colour combination); Picasso’s prints are Bloch or Baer numbers and his ceramics are Ramié numbers from Alain Ramié’s catalogue of the Madoura editions; Hockney’s early prints were catalogued by the Scottish Arts Council and the Tokyo retrospective volumes; Lichtenstein’s by Corlett.

Where an artist has no catalogue, as with Banksy or KAWS, the publisher’s records stand in for one, which is why Pest Control and Pace Prints are institutions in those markets. The number tells you the image, medium, paper, edition size, printer and publisher, and it is the first thing a condition report should quote.

The printer and the publisher are the parties an outsider ignores and a specialist checks first. The workshop that pulled the impression leaves a blind-stamp, or “chop”, in the margin: Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles and Tyler Graphics in New York for Hockney, Lichtenstein, Johns and Stella; Aetna Silkscreen Products and Factory Additions for Warhol’s 1960s portfolios; Pictures on Walls for Banksy; HENI for Hirst’s later editions (attributions from the standard references, not re-verified for this guide). The publisher financed the edition and set its size, and the same artist’s prints from different publishers trade at different levels because the market trusts some records more than others. A missing or wrong chop is the most common tell on a fake: the forger can photograph the image and the signature but has to guess the embossing.

Dating catches buyers out. A sheet described as “printed later” was pulled from an old matrix after the artist’s original edition, and the gap between a lifetime impression and a posthumous or restrike one can be tenfold. The Guardian reported in March 2024 that four of Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde sculptures dated to the 1990s had been made in 2017, and in May 2024 that at least 1,000 of The Currency paintings dated 2016 had been produced in 2018 and 2019 by hired painters at two studios; the studio’s position was that the dates reflect conception (The Guardian, via The Art Newspaper, March 23 and May 23, 2024). The date on the object is a claim, not a fact.

Paper is the most fragile support in the art market and the one whose condition is hardest to see across a room. Four kinds of damage account for most of the discount a prints specialist applies, and each has a name you will meet in the condition report.

Foxing is the scatter of small reddish-brown spots, often with dark centres, produced by microorganisms in paper kept in damp, stale air. Mat burn is the brown line or halo where an acidic window mat rested on the sheet for decades, and it follows the exact shape of the old frame opening. Light-staining (or time-staining) is the yellowing of paper and fading of pigment from ultraviolet exposure, and it is the reason a print that hung in a sunny room is worth less than its twin that lived in a drawer. Tape and hinge staining is the darkened band where an old adhesive was used to mount the sheet (definitions per the American Institute for Conservation wiki and the paper-conservation literature).

The discounts are not published, but the trade’s practice is consistent. A sheet in “excellent condition” with full margins, no fading and no restoration trades at the catalogue price. Light foxing or minor toning takes a small discount that widens in a soft market. Trimmed margins, a lost deckle edge (the feathered natural edge of the sheet) or a sheet laid down on board can halve the price of a modern print, because the market is buying the object as issued.

Fading is the killer for the colour-driven names: a Warhol Marilyn whose fluorescent inks have dulled, or a Hockney whose yellows have gone, is a different asset, and condition is the first thing a specialist reaches for to explain why two impressions of the same colourway can sell 45% apart in the same season, as the Marilyn in the Warhol section did in autumn 2025.

Restoration is possible and rarely free. A paper conservator can reduce foxing and light-staining by washing, remove old adhesive and flatten a cockled sheet, at rates that make a full treatment on a four-figure print uneconomic and on a six-figure one routine; the trade’s own conservation guides say plainly that some treatments cost more than the print. Prevention is cheaper: ultraviolet-filtering glazing, acid-free mounts, untouched hinge points, and a museum box for anything not on a wall. A framer who trims a sheet to fit a frame has destroyed money that no conservator can recover.

Banksy’s print market is the sector’s best-documented cycle and its best warning, because one dealer, MyArtBroker, has published the lot-level totals for the whole run. The prints were published by Pictures on Walls between 2002 and 2017, in signed editions of a few hundred and unsigned editions of several hundred more, at retail prices in the low hundreds of pounds, and for a decade the secondary market was small, British and cheap. Then the artist shredded a painting on the rostrum at Sotheby’s in October 2018. The shredded version, retitled Love is in the Bin, sold for £18.6M at Sotheby’s London on October 14, 2021 (The Art Newspaper), and the prints became the most liquid thing in the world with his name on them.

The numbers describe a mania. Turnover rose 106% in 2019 and 250% in 2020, and in 2021 Banksy prints made £35.2M at auction. Girl with Balloon, the canonical image, became, by MyArtBroker’s count, a £14M franchise in the print market alone.

Then the tide went out. In 2022 the average price fell 21%; in 2023 net sales fell 57% with 12% fewer prints sold and the average price down a further 31%, and the annual total was £6M on the dealer’s seven-year series (its year-end 2023 review counted £7M; the two MyArtBroker documents count differently, and this guide uses the series). In 2024, 200 lots made £5.1M at hammer, an average of £25,575; in 2025, 208 lots made £5.4M, an average of £25,810, with signed prints averaging £35,000 and unsigned £12,000 (MyArtBroker Banksy market reports, 2023–2026). Against the 2021 peak the market is down about 85% by value and has been flat for two years.

The individual results tell the same story from inside. Girl with Balloon, signed, made £190,500 in April 2023, the top Banksy print result of that year, and then £239,400 with fees (£190,000 at the hammer) at Christie’s London on March 1, 2024 (MyArtBroker). That is the pattern of every print correction: the best impression of the best image holds while the average falls, and the average is what most holders own. The dealer that publishes these numbers has described the market since 2024 as a “quiet bear market” and a buying opportunity; read that as the view of a business that earns a buyer’s commission, and note that a plateau is a market that stopped falling, not one that started rising.

What makes the Banksy market work at all is a single office. Pest Control, the artist’s own authentication body, is the only party that can confirm a work, and it charges £100 plus VAT for a print and £150 plus VAT for a unique work, with no charge if the piece is judged not genuine (MyArtBroker; Hang-Up Gallery; Artlife). The process takes weeks to months, longer when the backlog builds; a print without a Pest Control certificate is unsaleable at any serious venue, and the certificate, not the sheet, carries the value. A market that depends on one anonymous artist’s office answering emails has a single point of failure, and nobody has an answer to what happens when the artist dies.

KAWS is the case that shows what editions do to an artist’s market when they are the artist’s main product. Brian Donnelly, a former Disney animator and graffiti writer, built a market on vinyl figures, prints and companions produced in editions from a few dozen to open runs, and in 2019 his auction total reached $112.9M, the year The KAWS Album made $14.8M at Sotheby’s Hong Kong. In 2021, 1,764 KAWS lots sold at auction, more than in any other year, at a lower total value than 2019 because most of them were small editions.

By 2023 the annual auction total was $7.72M, the lowest of the decade and a fall of about 93% from the peak (MutualArt, “What Happened to KAWS?”; Artnet). Artnet’s own 2026 count of the same market gives $107.8M for 2019 and $32.3M for 2021; the databases differ by a few percent, the shape does not.

The mechanism was supply. A unique painting has one seller; an edition of 100 figures has a hundred, and an open edition has as many as the retailer chooses to make, so when demand softens there is nothing to stop the price except the sellers’ patience.

Gauntlet Gallery, a dealer in the work, puts the range for authentic KAWS figures in its 2025 price guide at $30 for an open-edition 4-inch Companion to $15,000 and above for limited 28-inch vinyls, with a 12-inch Grey Companion from the 2006 Accomplice series at $18,500 at auction in November 2023; the unique canvases, meanwhile, trade from $100,000 into the millions. The sector’s own vendors describe the post-2022 market as “more selective” with an 87% sell-through in 2024 (Maddox Gallery, a dealer), which is the phrase a market uses when it has stopped clearing at the old prices and started clearing at the new ones.

The lesson generalises. The flagship guide records that the ultra-contemporary segment’s average price roughly doubled from 2013 to 2021 and fell about 43% in 2024. Editions amplify that on the way down because they are the part of an artist’s output that a nervous holder can actually sell. An artist whose primary market is editions, whose edition sizes are growing, and whose releases sell out in minutes is at the point KAWS reached in 2019, and the size of the next release is the reading to watch.

Warhol is the reference market for editions because he treated the screenprint as a primary medium, published in large signed editions through the 1960s and 1970s, and left a catalogue raisonné precise enough to price by colourway. In the first half of 2025 he was the most traded print artist in the world by lot count, with 396 lots at auction (MyArtBroker, The Collectors’ Guide to the Print Market 2025). Depth is the asset: a buyer can find a comparable sale for almost any Warhol sheet within the last twelve months, which is the definition of price discovery.

The Marilyn Monroe portfolio of 1967, ten screenprints in an edition of 250, is the instrument itself. Between 2017 and 2025, 164 individual Marilyn prints and 12 complete sets sold at public auction for a combined £42.56M. A complete set made £704,000 at Sotheby’s New York in April 2017; another made about £2.41M at Christie’s New York in 2024, a compound rate of roughly 19% a year between the two sales; and the set record in MyArtBroker’s series is £3.58M at Christie’s New York in May 2022.

Artprice’s annual report for 2025 records the top print result of that year as a complete Marilyn set at $5.2M at Ketterer Kunst in Munich: the ten sheets made €4,488,000 with premium at the house’s December 2025 evening sale, to a Swiss collection (Ketterer Kunst). That is about £3.21M, which MyArtBroker ranks second to the 2022 Christie’s set; a record in dollars and not in sterling, because the exchange rate moved between the two sales. Either way the complete set has more than quadrupled in eight years while the Banksy and Hirst markets halved or worse from their 2021 and 2022 peaks: the trophy end of the deepest market behaved like a painting and the rest behaved like paper.

The single sheet is where most buyers live, and its numbers are useful precisely because they are noisy. Marilyn F&S II.31, the magenta-ground colourway, is estimated by MyArtBroker at £170,000 to £260,000 and has sold 32 times at auction since 2000. It carries the highest average hammer of any Marilyn colourway at £185,800 across 15 public sales, set a colourway record of £300,000 at Sotheby’s London in September 2025, the second-highest result for any individual Marilyn, and then hammered at £164,531 in October 2025 (MyArtBroker sale records). Two impressions of the same print sold weeks apart at prices 45% apart. That spread is condition, provenance, venue and the room, and it is the width of the market you are trading in, not an anomaly.

Warhol’s market also carries the sector’s authentication scar. The Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board announced in October 2011 that it would dissolve in early 2012; it cost about $500,000 a year to run and had spent close to $7M in legal fees defending an antitrust suit by the collector Joe Simon-Whelan over a rejected 1964 self-portrait, a suit the collector abandoned in 2010 (Philanthropy News Digest; Artforum; Hyperallergic). “Our money should be going to artists, not lawyers,” the foundation’s president Joel Wachs said.

Since then no living authority issues a yes on a Warhol; for a print the defence is the Feldman and Schellmann number, the verso stamp and signature, the paper, and a provenance back to a named publisher or dealer, and because the catalogue describes the edition sheet by sheet, that is workable in a way it is not for a canvas.

The four remaining markets show four different shapes, and the mechanism in each is the relationship between the artist’s output and the market’s appetite. The artist-level numbers are all from one dealer’s series so that they can be compared.

Hockney: the small-edition trophy

Hockney’s print market was worth about £4.6M at hammer across 202 lots in the first half of 2025, third among contemporary print artists behind Warhol and Lichtenstein (MyArtBroker). Then came the October 17, 2025 sale in the cold open: seventeen Arrival of Spring iPad prints from a single owner, £6.21M against a £1.7M low estimate, and records for their subject on fifteen of the seventeen lots (Sotheby’s; Artnet News; HENI; Smithsonian). The editions are 25 for the standard format and 10 for the large, and the series had traded privately at £180,000 to £230,000 earlier in 2025. A single-owner group from an edition of 25 by an artist whose paintings trade above $90M is scarce in a way a Warhol edition of 250 is not, and the room priced it as scarce.

Kusama: volume without a floor

Yayoi Kusama’s prints are among the most traded editions by any living artist. In 2024, 256 Kusama prints and sets made £5.77M at hammer; in 2025 the figure was £4.91M from 240 sales, a fall of 15% in value on 6% fewer lots. Within that, the frequently traded Pumpkin editions, Pumpkin (Yellow Y) and Pumpkin 2, hammered between about £35,000 and £65,000 from 2024, and Shanghai Pumpkin reached £94,321 in December 2025 (MyArtBroker, 2026). Kusama’s editions are large and her studio keeps issuing them, so the market has depth and no scarcity; the price is set by the flow of demand rather than by supply, and in 2025 the average fell while the best image held.

Hirst: the saturation case

Damien Hirst’s print market peaked at £4.6M in 2022, fell to £2.4M from 300 lots in 2023, held at £2.5M from 320 lots in 2024, and made £2.1M from 356 lots in 2025, less than half the peak on more transactions; the first half of 2026 added £663,000 from 72 lots (MyArtBroker Hirst market reports, 2026). The cause is supply: Hirst’s studio and HENI release new editions continuously, and the dealer that tracks him calls the result saturation.

The Currency, his 2021 project of 10,000 spot paintings on paper sold at $2,000 each with an NFT twin, is the purest case: buyers had a year to choose the sheet or the token, 5,149 kept the paper, 4,851 kept the NFT, and the 4,851 unclaimed sheets were burned at Newport Street Gallery during an exhibition that opened on September 9, 2022 (HENI; The Art Newspaper; designboom). An edition whose size is set by how many people apply has no scarcity premium to earn.

Picasso ceramics: the old, stable edition market

Picasso’s Madoura ceramics are the counter-example, a market that has behaved like a mature edition for sixty years. Between 1947 and 1971 the Madoura pottery in Vallauris issued his designs in editions of 25 to 500, catalogued by Alain Ramié with A.R. numbers. The record for the medium belongs to Grand vase aux femmes voilées, a 1950 vase in an edition of 25, an example of which made £735,650 ($1.15M) against a £70,000–100,000 estimate in Christie’s Madoura Collection sale in London in June 2012 (Art and Antiques).

Another from the same edition was the top lot of Christie’s online Picasso Ceramics sale in May 2025 at an estimate of £150,000–250,000, and was reported sold at £604,800 (Artnet News; the result is not re-verified). That May 2025 sale, exhibited at Christie’s King Street from May 8 to 22, ran to more than 140 pieces by the trade press’s count with estimates from £1,000 to £250,000, which is the price ladder in one room: plates and tiles from an edition of 500 at the bottom, large-edition vases in the middle, small-edition sculptural pieces at the top.

What distinguishes this market is that the artist is dead, the editions are closed, the catalogue is complete, and the buyers are on three continents; by the trade’s own account of pieces that made $4,000 fifteen years ago and $16,000 in 2025 (Art and Antiques, a dealer-side figure), its return is in the high single digits a year before fees, which is the closest an edition market gets to the long-run record of paintings.

The buyer’s premium, the fee the winning bidder pays the house on top of the hammer, is the same percentage at the top houses for a $2,000 sheet as for a $2M canvas, which is the single most important cost fact in the sector. The schedules below are as published in 2026, and the chart converts them into dollars on a $10,000 hammer; the sister guide, How Art Auctions Work, covers premiums, guarantees and sales tax in full.

Christie’s and Sotheby’s charge a buyer’s premium of 28% of the hammer on lots up to $2M (£1.5M in London), 22% from there to $8M, and 15% above. Sotheby’s moved to that schedule in every saleroom and category except wine and spirits on February 13, 2026, and Christie’s matched it from September 1, 2026, in every department except wine (Antiques Trade Gazette; The Art Newspaper; ARTnews). Both run dedicated Prints and Multiples sales in New York and London, live and online, at the same premium. The seller pays a separate commission, negotiable and often around 10% at the print level, plus photography and insurance charges; our worked example uses 10%.

Phillips went the other way a year earlier, from September 1, 2025, with a two-tier schedule that rewards early commitment, in every category except watches. Its standard buyer’s premium in New York is 29% of the hammer up to $1M, 22% from there to $6M and 15% above.

A bidder who lodges a written absentee bid at or above the low estimate with the bids department at least 48 hours before the sale qualifies for “Priority Bidding” rates of 25%, 20% and 14%, and if that bidder then wins by phone or online at a higher price, the lower rate still applies to the whole hammer (Phillips buyer’s premium schedule, effective September 1, 2025 and restated April 12, 2026; ARTnews; Ocula). The London schedule is the same rates with 20% VAT on top: 34.8%, 26.4% and 18% standard, 30%, 24% and 16.8% priority.

Heritage Auctions, the Dallas collectibles house, charges a 25% buyer’s premium on the first $1M of the hammer with a $49 minimum per lot (20% to $5M, 15% above) in its Prints and Multiples signature sales, and its April 2026 sale ran on that schedule (Heritage; Artsy).

MyArtBroker, the London prints dealer whose data run through this guide, charges the buyer an average commission of about 18% and the seller nothing, matching private buyers to private sellers; Artsy lists gallery inventory and runs partner auctions on fees we could not verify and do not quote. Dealers price with the margin inside the number: a dealer who bought a sheet at auction has paid the premium and needs a markup, so a gallery price for a common edition sits above the last auction price. The margin is smaller than the trade’s folklore suggests. Secondary-market dealer margins run at about 5% on work above $1M and around 20% below $100,000, the rate falling as the value rises, which puts almost every print at the top of that band. The 30% to 50% figure repeated everywhere as a “dealer markup” is a different number: it is the gallery’s share of a first sale on the primary market, not the margin a dealer takes to resell a sheet that has already been to auction.

The arithmetic points one way. A print bought and sold at major houses pays about 28% in and 10% out on the hammer, so the hammer must rise about 42% before the proceeds match the invoice, before tax; the same print sold through a zero-commission broker needs a 28% rise. The venue you exit through matters as much as the one you enter through, and a buyer who has not decided how they will sell has not priced the position.

An edition is the easiest thing in art to fake, because the original was itself a mechanical reproduction and the forger’s task is to match paper, ink and a signature rather than to paint. The cases of the last three years show the scale. In March 2024, Catalan police announced they had broken up a ring that had been making fake Banksy Dismaland works in an apartment workshop in Zaragoza, raided the previous December: nine works seized, at least 25 more already sold at up to €1,500 each to buyers in Spain, Germany, Switzerland, the United States and Scotland, and four people charged with fraud and intellectual-property offences; a distributor with knowledge of the graphic-works trade had produced fake certificates to go with them (Artnet News; Smithsonian).

In November 2024, Italian police announced the seizure of about 2,100 forged works and roughly 500 fake certificates and stamps, some issued by complicit Italian auction houses, valued near €200M ($213M). The network of 38 suspects across Italy, Spain, France and Belgium had staged two catalogued exhibitions of fake Banksys, in Mestre and Cortona, and also produced Warhols and Picassos (Artnet News; CNN).

In April 2026 a New Jersey father and daughter, Erwin Bankowski and Karolina Bankowska, pleaded guilty in federal court in Brooklyn to a scheme that consigned more than 200 counterfeit works attributed to Warhol, Banksy, Picasso and others to galleries and auction houses between 2020 and 2025, with forged gallery stamps and certificates on aged paper, for at least $2M (Artnet News; The Art Newspaper, May 6, 2026). The fakes come with paperwork, and the paperwork is the product.

The defences are specific. For Banksy, only a Pest Control certificate counts, and the certificate is issued to a named holder for a named work; a print offered “with COA from the gallery” and no Pest Control paperwork is a print without provenance. For Warhol there is no board, so the buyer checks the Feldman and Schellmann number, the verso stamp and signature against the catalogue’s description, the paper against the stated stock, and the chain of ownership back to a dealer or publisher of record.

For every artist, the printer’s chop must be present, the sheet dimensions must match the catalogue to the millimetre, the numbering must be in the medium the catalogue says, and the surface must be examined under raking and ultraviolet light for the flatness of an inkjet copy of a screenprint.

New York law adds a warranty. A dealer in the state selling a print or photograph for more than $100 must give the buyer, in writing and before the sale, the artist’s identity, whether the signature is the artist’s, the medium, whether the multiple is a reproduction, when it was produced and from what master, and the edition size. That disclosure then stands as an express warranty that no further numbered impressions exist (Article 15 of the New York Arts and Cultural Affairs Law, §15.01 onward), which is why a New York dealer invoice is worth more than a foreign one.

Counterparty risk is easier to miss than forgery. A print is small, portable and unregistered, so a buyer who leaves it on consignment or pays in advance for an undelivered edition is an unsecured creditor of a business with no capital, and selling one object twice, the flagship guide’s Philbrick structure, is trivially easy when no one can tell impression 34/250 from 35/250 in a photograph. Take delivery, photograph the verso and the chop, and keep the invoice with the catalogue number on it; that file is the asset’s title.

The US tax code treats a print exactly as it treats a painting, and worse than it treats a share. A print held more than a year and sold at a gain is a collectible, and the gain is taxed at a maximum federal rate of 28% under Internal Revenue Code §1(h)(4)–(5), against 20% for long-term gains on securities, plus the 3.8% net investment income tax under §1411 above $200,000 of income for a single filer and $250,000 for a couple, for a top federal rate of 31.8% (IRS Topic 409; the flagship guide’s tax section, fact-checked September 9, 2026). A print sold within a year of purchase is taxed as ordinary income.

Like-kind exchanges for art ended with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, so a sale cannot be rolled into another print, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of July 4, 2025 left all of this untouched. Basis includes the buyer’s premium, the sales tax and the shipping and framing, which matters because those are a third of the cost. A loss is deductible only if the print was held as an investment rather than for personal use, because §165(c) limits an individual’s deductible losses to business, for-profit and casualty losses, and the IRS decides which on facts such as whether the sheet hung in your living room.

Sales tax is charged on the invoice, premium included, at the rate of the delivery location; New York City’s is 8.875%, and a buyer who ships to a no-sales-tax state owes use tax at home in most states.

The round trip

Take a signed, numbered print by a catalogued blue-chip name hammered at $12,000 in a New York online prints sale in 2026. The 28% buyer’s premium adds $3,360, for an invoice of $15,360. New York City sales tax at 8.875% on the invoice adds $1,363. Shipping and conservation framing with ultraviolet-filtering glazing, $700. Money out on day one, which is also your tax basis: $17,423, for a sheet whose hammer price was $12,000. Schedule it on a homeowner’s policy at about 1% of value a year, $150, and hold for seven years: $1,050. Cash committed: $18,473.

Sell it in year seven at a hammer of $20,000, a rise of 67%, about 7.6% a year, which is more than any print market in this guide has returned over a seven-year window that includes a correction. Through an auction house with a 10% seller’s commission and $150 of fees, net proceeds are $17,850; the gain over basis is $427, the federal tax at 31.8% is $136, and you hold $17,714 against $18,473 committed, a loss of $759 after seven years in which the print did well.

Through a zero-commission broker, net proceeds are $20,000, the gain is $2,577, the tax is $819, and you hold $19,181, a profit of $708, or about 0.5% a year. The after-tax break-even hammer price is about $21,240 through an auction house, a rise of 77%, and about $18,960 through a broker, a rise of 58%. The flagship guide’s $100,000 painting, held ten years, needed a 78% rise on the same fee assumptions; the print needs almost exactly the same, because every fee in the stack is a percentage.

Scale the example down to $5,000 and the fixed costs bite harder: $700 of framing and shipping is 11% of the invoice. Scale it up to $25,000 and the sales tax on a $32,000 invoice is $2,840. There is no ticket size at which the round trip through two auction houses costs less than about 40% of the hammer; the only variables the buyer controls are the exit venue and the holding period.

The one art index on our tape is the Artprice100, the index of the hundred best-selling artists at auction, which we store at year-end levels: 91.7 on December 31, 2024 and 101.97 on December 31, 2025, a rise of 11.2%, matching the publisher’s own figure for the year (Artprice, January 2026). This section states what our data hold for the print market and what they do not. The Artprice100 is a blue-chip painting index, not a print index, and the fact that it rose in the year the Kusama and Hirst print totals fell is the point of quoting it here: the two markets do not move together, and a reader who uses the index as a guide to what their editions are worth is reading the wrong instrument.

Our IA Composite, a provisional cross-asset index of the alternative markets this hub covers, stood at 100.271 on September 8, 2026, up 5.74% over thirty days and 0.29% over a year; it contains no print series and is quoted only to place the art market in the wider tape.

The other art series we keep are activity counts for Masterworks, the fractional painting platform: 69 Form 1-U filings (the current-report form a Regulation A issuer files with the SEC) and 9 new offerings in the ninety days to September 8, 2026, read daily from SEC EDGAR full-text search, and 8 exits over 400 days with our own median exit IRR on the platform’s reported exits of 11.5%, a single read dated July 16, 2026 and our construction rather than the platform’s advertised figure. They are ours, they describe a painting platform, and they are not market-wide numbers; none of the fractional platforms in the flagship guide offers editions, and none of the Masterworks series says anything about paper. The sister guide, Investing in Art Through Fractional Shares and Funds, covers those platforms and their fees.

What we do not have is a print series, which is why this guide leans on a single dealer’s totals for the artist markets. The series we intend to build is a repeat-sale basket of signed, catalogued blue-chip sheets (a Marilyn colourway, a Girl with Balloon, a Kusama Pumpkin, a Hockney iPad print), recorded at hammer each time an impression trades. Until then, every artist-level number here is MyArtBroker’s, and we say so each time.

The sequence below is the one we would follow with $5,000 to $25,000, cheap steps before expensive ones.

1. Choose one catalogued artist and one image. Pick a name with a catalogue raisonné or a publisher of record and a single canonical series, and read the catalogue entry until you can recite the edition size, the paper, the printer and the signature location. You are buying a catalogue number, not a picture.
2. Build the price file before the first bid. Pull every public sale of that number for the last five years, at hammer, with the date, the venue and the condition note, and write down the median, the best and the worst. For Marilyn II.31 that file runs from £164,531 to £300,000 inside one autumn, and a buyer who has not seen the spread will pay the top of it.
3. Set the exit before the entry. Decide before bidding whether you will sell through a broker at no commission or a house at 10%, and compute the break-even hammer from the worked example above with your own state’s sales tax. If the number needs the market to double, stop.
4. Bid absentee, early, at a house that rewards it. Lodge a written bid at least 48 hours before a Phillips sale for the priority rate, and at every house set the ceiling as a hammer figure that already includes the premium and tax you will owe.
5. Inspect or commission a condition report on paper, not on a screen. Ask for the sheet out of the frame, full margins visible, the verso photographed, the chop identified, and any foxing, mat burn, light-staining or tape residue named. For Banksy, no Pest Control certificate, no bid; for Warhol, no F&S match, no bid.
6. Take delivery, frame conservationally, and file. Ultraviolet-filtering glazing, acid-free mounts, no trimming, and a folder holding the invoice with the catalogue number, the condition report, the certificate and dated photographs of the recto and verso. That folder is what the next buyer is paying for.
7. Hold through one full correction. The Banksy series says a print correction takes two years to run and two more to flatten; size the purchase so that the money is not needed for seven years.

The readings below are the ones that would change our view, each with its level as of September 10, 2026.

Banksy’s annual print total. MyArtBroker’s series closed 2025 at £5.4M from 208 lots. A 2026 total above £8M, a rise of about 50%, is the first leg of the pattern that preceded 2021, and a signal to sell into strength; a total below £4M is a new post-boom low and says the plateau was a ledge.

The signed-to-unsigned ratio. £35,000 against £12,000 in 2025, about 3:1. A ratio above 4:1 says the money is concentrating in the top sheets and the unsigned market is dying; below 2.5:1 says a new retail wave is buying whatever has the name on it.

The fee war. Phillips’s priority schedule has been in place since September 1, 2025, the first cut to a buyer’s premium at a major house since Sotheby’s reversed its 2024 experiment; a year on, Christie’s and Sotheby’s have both raised their lowest tier to 28% rather than matched it. If either publishes an early-bid discount by September 2027, the 28% standard has become a list price; if Phillips withdraws it, 28% is the floor and the round trip in the worked example is permanent.

The next complete Marilyn set. The Ketterer set of December 2025 made €4.49M, $5.2M by Artprice’s count and about £3.21M, below the 2022 sterling record. A set below $4M at a major house would say the 2025 result was a single-room event; a set above $6M would say the trophy edition has decoupled from the print market entirely.

Hockney’s Arrival of Spring at resale. An impression of the February 19 picture, from the edition of 25, hammering below £500,000 at its next public appearance would say the October 2025 sale priced a single-owner group, not the edition. MyArtBroker’s 2026 Hockney report refers to a second supply event in the first quarter of 2026 that we could not check; its results are the first reading.

Our tape. The Artprice100 closed 2025 at 101.97. A year-end 2026 level below 100 would put the blue-chip index under water for the cycle. In 2025 the index rose while three of the print markets in this guide fell, so a falling index is not by itself a print signal; the artist totals above are the readings that would say the plateau has ended, and an index below 100 with those totals still flat would say the whole market, not only paper, has stalled.