Art's come to Moses moment

There is nothing complicated about the Mei Moses Art Index: essentially it tracks how prime paintings have sold at auction over the years.

What has made it a commercial success is the wealth of detail, together with the formidable cross-referencing features that the two veteran finance-world academics were able to introduce. The Mei Moses model, dreamed up by Mei Jianping and Michael Moses is based on a proprietary set of over 10,000 sales of art objects that have sold at auction more than once.

The index tracks four important collecting categories: American painting before 1950; impressionist and modern paintings; old master and 19th century paintings, and post-war and contemporary paintings. It relies on a huge bank of information, originally collated by Moses and, with the help of Mei, turned into a valuable analytical resource.

The now-retired professor Moses, who was a faculty member at New York University for three decades, has authored three books including a tome on 18th century American furniture.