How to Start Collecting Art: A Beginner's Guide

Almost nobody decides to start collecting art. What usually happens is that you buy one thing you could not stop thinking about, and a year later you buy another. This guide is for the moment just before the first purchase, when you want to know how to start collecting art without making an expensive mistake or feeling like an outsider in a world that can seem closed.

There is no entry fee, no required knowledge and no minimum budget. There is only a sequence of decisions, and they are easier in the right order.

What collecting actually means

A collection is not defined by size or by money. It is defined by intent: you are choosing work you want to live with, keeping it, and letting the choices accumulate into something that says more together than any single piece does alone. Three works bought carefully over three years is a collection. Twelve prints bought in one afternoon to fill a hallway is decoration, which is a perfectly good thing to want, but it is a different activity and it leads to different decisions.

The distinction matters because it changes what a good purchase looks like. Decoration is judged by how well it fits a room. A collection is judged by whether you still want the work when the room changes.

Why people collect, and why it is not really about money

The honest reason most collectors give is that a piece would not leave them alone. There is some evidence for what is happening there. When people looked at images they rated as intensely moving, researchers found activity in the default mode network, a brain system usually associated with inward, self referential thought rather than with processing the outside world (Vessel, Starr and Rubin, 2012, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience). The work that stops you is engaging the part of you that thinks about yourself.

That also explains why taste is so personal. Across several visual domains, people broadly agree about which faces and which natural landscapes are beautiful, but that agreement largely disappears for artwork, where preference is driven far more by individual sensibility (Vessel, Maurer, Denker and Starr, 2018, Cognition). There is no consensus you are failing to guess.

And living with art is not a neutral activity. A review of the evidence linking aesthetic experience to wellbeing gathers studies in museums, healthcare and education, including measurements of lowered blood pressure and reduced salivary cortisol after museum visits, and argues that the positive emotion produced by aesthetic experience feeds back into mood and health (Mastandrea, Fagioli and Biasi, 2019, Frontiers in Psychology). That is a modest claim, not a cure, but it is a better reason to buy than resale value.

Step 1: train your eye before you spend anything

Give yourself one afternoon with no intention of buying. Visit three studios, or one open studio weekend, or a museum you have not been to. Photograph everything that makes you stop walking. Do not analyze it while you are there.

Look at the photos a week later. The pattern will be obvious to you even though you could not have described it in advance, and it is usually a quality rather than a subject: a kind of light, a density of surface, a narrow range of color, a particular kind of mark. That pattern is your taste, and knowing it is worth more than any amount of art history.

Step 2: set a budget you will not regret

Decide the number at home, before you are standing in front of something. Pick a figure you would be comfortable spending on an object you cannot resell quickly and would not want to. Then add roughly 20 percent for framing, transport and hanging, which almost everyone forgets.

A rule that works for a first year: set one annual budget rather than a per piece budget, and keep any single work under a quarter of it. Four decisions teach you more than one. Our guide on how much to spend on art goes through this in detail, including why treating a first purchase as an investment is a poor reason to stretch.

Step 3: decide where to look

Each channel gives you a different amount of information for a different price.

• The artist’s studio. The most information, the lowest price, and the only place you can ask the maker anything. There is no gallery commission on top.
• Galleries. Curation, context and a dealer relationship, paid for through a commission on the sale.
• Open studio weekends. Dozens of practices in a day, free to attend, no pressure to buy.
• Degree shows. The most affordable work by people at the very start.
• Online. Convenient, wide, and the place where the least information travels with the work. Read how to buy art online safely before you use it.
• Auctions. A resale market with public prices and a buyer’s premium. Rarely the right first purchase.

For a first piece, seeing the work in person and meeting the person who made it removes most of the risk at once.

Step 4: buy the first piece

When you have found something, slow down for one day. The first reaction to an artwork is not the same as a lasting one, and a piece that is instantly pleasing can be the one you stop seeing. Walk away, come back, and see whether it still pulls. Our guide on how to choose art you will love has a short set of questions that make this easier.

Before you pay, ask for the title, year, medium and exact dimensions, whether the work is unique or part of an edition, how it should be cared for, and whether the frame is included. None of these questions are rude. Then ask for an invoice with all of it written down.

Step 5: keep a record from day one

This takes five minutes at the point of sale and it is the single thing beginners skip and later regret. For every piece keep three things together: the invoice with artist, title, year, medium, size, price and date; a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist for editions and for anything unsigned on the front; and photographs of the work as received, front and back.

A folder or a simple spreadsheet is enough. In ten years this file is the provenance of your collection, and it is what makes insuring, lending, reselling or passing the work on possible at all.

Step 6: let the collection tell you what it is

You do not need a theme, a period or a medium to start, and choosing one early tends to produce a collection that looks like a plan rather than a person. Consistency appears on its own after four or five purchases, and it is usually not the thing you would have predicted.

What does help is following artists rather than hunting objects. Buy from someone whose practice you can watch over time, visit again a year later, and see what changed. The second purchase from the same artist is often better than the first, because by then you understand what they are doing.

Five mistakes that cost beginners the most

• Buying the first thing you see. See twenty pieces before you buy one.
• Buying for resale value. Auction returns are modest and heavily flattered by survivorship. See our budgeting guide for the numbers.
• Buying to fill a wall. Furniture changes faster than art does.
• Skipping the paperwork. Five minutes now, hours later.
• Waiting until you know enough. Nobody starts knowing enough. You learn by buying.

Common questions

• How much do I need to start? Less than most people assume. Works on paper, small formats and studies are the accessible end of almost any artist’s practice.
• Do I need to know art history? No. It makes conversations richer, but it is not what makes a purchase good.
• Is it rude to visit a studio and not buy? No. Artists want visitors, and most sales happen on a second or third visit.
• What if my taste changes? It will, and that is not a failure. A collection that records how you changed is more interesting than one that does not.
• Should I buy an original or a print? Both are legitimate. Just make sure you know which one you are buying, and whether an edition is limited and numbered.

What a first purchase usually costs, and what it does not

The price of the work is rarely the whole number. Works on paper almost always need framing, and a good frame can cost as much as a small piece. Anything you cannot carry needs packing and a courier. Heavy work needs the right fixings and a wall that can take them. And once a collection passes a few thousand dollars it is worth checking whether your home insurance covers it, because many policies cap individual items well below what a single work is worth.

None of this is a reason not to start. It is a reason to know the real number before you commit, so the framing bill does not arrive as a surprise three weeks later.

Living with the work once it is yours

Hang art out of direct sunlight, away from radiators, and away from bathrooms and kitchens where humidity swings. Center the piece at roughly eye level, around 57 to 60 inches from the floor to the middle of the work, and hang it lower if you mostly see the room from a chair. Use fixings rated well above the actual weight of the piece.

Then leave it alone. Give a new work a year on the wall before you judge whether it was the right choice. The pieces people end up loving most are frequently not the ones that were easiest to like on the first day, and the only way to find that out is to live with it.

When to buy a second piece

There is no schedule. But two signals are reliable. The first is that you find yourself comparing new work to something you already own, which means you now have a reference point rather than an opinion. The second is that you go back to an artist you already bought from and the new work looks better to you than the old work did at the time. That is not the artist improving. That is you learning to see what they are doing.

When both are true, you are not a beginner any more, whatever the size of the collection.

Sources

• Vessel, E. A., Starr, G. G., and Rubin, N. (2012). The brain on art: intense aesthetic experience activates the default mode network. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6:66. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2012.00066
• 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
• Mastandrea, S., Fagioli, S., and Biasi, V. (2019). Art and psychological well-being: linking the brain to the aesthetic emotion. Frontiers in Psychology, 10:739. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00739

Start with one studio

You do not need a strategy to begin. You need to stand in front of real work with the person who made it. Browse artist studios near you by neighborhood and medium, message any artist directly, and go and look. Free to browse, free to message, and whatever you buy, the artist keeps.