This May, for instance, Sotheby's auctioned off Mark Rothko's White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) for $72.8 million. (The seller, David Rockefeller, bought the painting for $10,000 in 1960.)

The sale price was about $30 million more than was expected and the highest price ever paid at auction for a contemporary work. By comparison, Rothko's Homage to Matisse fetched only $22.41 million two years ago.

The Mei Moses Fine Art Index, which tracks global art auction sales, showed returns of more than 18 percent last year, beating out the S&P 500 Index by more than 2 percentage points. According to Beautiful Asset Advisors, which produces the fine art index, annual returns on art auction sales have also bested stocks over the past five- and 10-year periods.

That has caused a lot of people to divorce art from meaning, says Mitchell Moss, director of the Taub Urban Research Center at New York University. "The art of collecting has turned into the science of investing," he says. "Art has now gone from being something you hang on the wall, that you collect, to being an annuity."

Artistic Investment Advisers is firmly in the annuity camp. In fact, its backers couldn't care less if art forced people, as Jackson Pollock put it, to come "face to face" with themselves, unless that reflection revealed some riches too.

"I am not really interested in art," says Justin Williams, an art collector and a director of Artistic Investment Advisers. "It is simply a commodity, which, when plugged into our business model, produces substantial returns for investors."

One of his partners, Chris Carlson, adds that he has no idea what makes good art. "I am not an art critic," he says.

What Williams and Carlson, a former trader at Deutsche Bank and UBS, say they do know—and know well—is how to profit from an inefficient market, even when it is not rising. They say they intend to do this by exploiting the geographical arbitrage that exists between what buyers and sellers in different cities and countries are willing to pay, by picking up pieces during distress sales, and by buying directly from a select group of artists.