Otherwise, Mr. Rachofsky predicts Mr. Trump’s effect on the art world will be “neutral,” while also noting, “The only thing that will be certain this year will be uncertainty.” This dichotomy — the financial security of the 1 percent contrasting with more general geopolitical nervousness — looks set to be the default mode of the art market for some time. As a result, both amateur and professional buyers, mindful of art’s reputation as a financial safe haven, are concentrating on the proven so-called investment grade names of the postwar and contemporary periods. “Collectors seemed to be congregated around blue chip galleries, acquiring selectively and focusing on more established artists,” said Heather Flow, an adviser in New York, describing the dynamic at last month’s Art Basel fair in Miami Beach. “The uncertainty and instability globally seems to weigh more heavily on collectors’ minds than the prospect of a tax bill that could boost the after-tax income of the top 1 percent of highest-earning Americans,” she added. The risk of speculating in young art was underlined in October when a 4-foot-high 2010 silver abstract by the New York painter Jacob Kassay sold for 25,000 pounds, or about $31,000, at a Sotheby’s day auction in London. Back in 2011, when the market for Mr. Kassay was at its zenith, another 4-foot silver abstract from 2010 sold at a Phillips evening sale for $257,000. With young abstraction no longer the force it was, the art market has settled into a more predictable cycle of auctions and fairs offering works by the reassuringly familiar. “We haven’t been buying living artists. We’ve been focusing on names like Picasso, Josef Albers and Yves Klein,” said Javier Lumbreras, founder of the Artemundi Global Fund, a five-year closed-end art fund in New York that liquidated in 2015, producing an average net annual return of about 17.1 percent for investors, according to its website. (Mr. Lumbreras said he would be offering a new, modified fund to investors in the spring.)
Mr. Trump’s stated commitments to reducing taxes and regulation, as well as to negotiating better trade deals and investing in infrastructure, have helped the Dow Jones industrial average climb to 19,833.68 at the close of trading on Dec. 28, about an 8.2 percent increase since Nov. 8. This in turn is creating a feel-good factor in the art world, where America’s 1 percent makes up by far the largest proportion of the most serious buyers.