How to Choose Art You'll Love (and Not Regret)

Most people know how to choose art in the abstract: buy what you love. It is good advice and it is also useless the moment you are standing in front of forty paintings with a budget and no idea where to start. This guide turns that advice into something you can actually use, so you end up with work you still want to look at in five years.

This is one step inside a bigger process. If you are at the very beginning, start with our full guide on how to start collecting art, which covers training your eye, setting a budget and making the first purchase end to end.

Your taste is supposed to be personal

There is a real fear behind most hesitation in front of an artwork: what if I pick the wrong thing and it turns out I have bad taste. It helps to know that researchers have measured this. In a study across several visual domains, people largely agreed with each other about which faces and which natural landscapes they found beautiful, but agreement collapsed when they looked at artwork. Preference for art turned out to be driven far more by individual sensibility than by shared standards (Vessel, Maurer, Denker and Starr, 2018, Cognition).

That is not a small footnote. It means there is no hidden consensus you are failing to guess. When a piece moves you and leaves the person next to you cold, the system is working exactly as it should.

Look twice before you decide

The first reaction to an artwork is not the same as a lasting one. Research on processing fluency shows that the easier something is for the brain to take in, the more we tend to like it, and that repeated exposure makes almost anything easier to process (Reber, Schwarz and Winkielman, 2004, Personality and Social Psychology Review). Familiarity feels like preference.

This cuts both ways. A piece that is instantly pleasing may simply be easy, and easy can get boring on a wall you pass every day. A piece that puzzles you at first can grow into the one you keep. The practical move is simple: never buy on the first look alone. Walk away, come back an hour later or the next day, and see whether it still pulls at you.

Five questions that do the work for you

When you are stuck between pieces, stop asking whether it is good and start asking these.

• Where does my eye go, and does it stay? Work that holds your attention for thirty seconds will hold it for years.
• What do I feel, not what do I think? Naming the feeling is more useful than naming the style.
• Would I still want this if nobody else ever saw it? This separates taste from signaling.
• Do I want to know more about the person who made it? Curiosity about the maker predicts a long relationship with the work.
• What would I miss if it were gone? If nothing, walk away without guilt.

See it where it is going to live

A studio has high ceilings, concrete floors and daylight from one side. Your hallway does not. Before you commit, take a photo of the piece and hold it up in the room where it will hang. Check the wall color, the light at the hour you are usually home, and the distance you will normally view it from. Scale is the thing people get wrong most often. A work that reads as intimate in a studio can disappear above a large sofa.

If the work will hang somewhere specific, our guide on how to buy art covers measuring, framing and getting the piece home safely.

Talk to the artist

The single fastest way to know whether you will love a piece long term is to ask the person who made it what it is about. Not for the sales pitch, for the story. You will learn what they were trying to do, what materials they used, how it should be cared for and what else exists in the series. Buying directly also means you are not paying a gallery commission on top of the price, and the artist keeps what you pay.

This is exactly what studio visits are for. You can browse artist studios near you and message any artist directly to arrange a visit.

The regret test

Before you pay, run one last check. Regret after buying art almost always comes from one of four places: you bought it as an investment rather than because you wanted it, you bought it to fill a gap on a wall, you bought it under time pressure, or you spent more than you were comfortable with. If any of those is true, wait a week. Good work is not as scarce as the pressure suggests, and the artist would rather sell to someone who is sure.

If budget is the sticking point, our guide on how much to spend on art gives you a framework for setting a number before you start looking.

Ignore the wall, at least at first

The fastest way to end up with art you do not care about is to start from an empty wall and go looking for something the right size. Decoration and collecting are different activities and they pull in opposite directions. Choose the work first, then solve the wall. A piece that is slightly too small for the space it ends up in is a much smaller problem than a piece you chose because it fit.

Give yourself a reference point

If you have no idea what you like yet, spend two hours looking without any intention of buying. Visit three studios, or one open studio weekend, and photograph everything that makes you stop. Do not analyze it while you are there. Look at the photos a week later and the pattern will be obvious to you even if you could not have described it in advance. Most people find they are drawn to a quality rather than a subject: a kind of light, a density of surface, a specific range of color.

Sources

• Vessel, E. A., Maurer, N., Denker, A. H., and Starr, G. G. (2018). Stronger shared taste for natural aesthetic domains than for artifacts of human culture. Cognition, 179, 121 to 131. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2018.06.009
• Reber, R., Schwarz, N., and Winkielman, P. (2004). Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: is beauty in the perceiver’s processing experience? Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(4), 364 to 382. doi:10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3

Start with a studio near you

The best way to find out what you actually respond to is to stand in front of real work. Browse artist studios by neighborhood and medium, message the artists whose work stops you, and go see it in person. Free to browse, free to message.