How to Start Collecting Original Art Without Feeling Intimidated

Starting an original art collection does not require expertise, wealth, or certainty.

The biggest hindrance I see with most new art collectors is simply: fear. There is an anxiety around making the wrong choice, looking bad, not understanding what one is buying, wasting money, but above all, a fear of misrepresentation.

There is something so fundamentally personal and intimate about art that getting it “wrong” can feel almost existentially devastating. This is very akin to the angst experienced by artists themselves in their own beginnings: the same fear of misalignment. 

So how do we navigate this fear?

Well, first of all, one must understand a few things:

What Does It Mean to Collect Art?

The world, heavily influenced by the art market, might have you believe that art collecting is reserved only for the very few: the rich, the famous, and the formally educated in the fine arts, such as art historians or curators. You’d be surprised to discover that I deeply disagree with this stance, as I argue in my article “What is an art collector?”.

We all collect things, and most of those things tend to say more about us than about the things themselves. Collecting is as natural as making or enjoying art itself. Even as little children we collect toys, little cars, or dolls. I preferred to collect rocks and hoped to one day have a whole museum dedicated to the rocks I collected, not knowing such museums already existed!

So why then have we severed our natural tendency to want to own things that define or speak to us when it comes to fine art?

There are many variables to this equation: the abstraction of art, marketing, the culture of the art market and its positioning as ultimate achievement, the sensationalization of auction houses, and the monetisation of historical records of art history itself, just to name a few.

How should one then not feel intimidated by it all?

Well, here’s the good news:

You Do Not Need to Be an Expert

In fact, I personally prefer the people who come up to me at my exhibitions and say, “You know, I don’t know the first thing about art!” I celebrate them, because for me, they represent the most direct experience with art any artist can hope for, or should hope for. 

This unadulterated raw experience of the artwork itself is something we have forgotten to cherish. Imagine a child discovering the taste of chocolate for the first time, or those familiar videos of babies tasting lemons. They are repulsed, but intrigued. They taste this tartness and cry, but soon thereafter their faces light up and they want more, simply because the way that lemon made them feel was so new, it was exciting!

Likewise I love seeing that first encounter with art, and as long as I see an inkling of that excitement or curiosity, I consider my job well done.

And so should you! 

Begin With What Stays With You

 

Typically when people walk into a gallery or an art fair, their first and most natural question is: Do I like this?

Depending on where you are from, your cultural and social roots, as well as your personal taste, this will mean one thing or another. But in all cases, it will give you information about your aesthetic preferences. I personally make a point in my practice not to disregard, or worse, put down such preferences as “uneducated in the fine arts”, as many others do. But I will make the point that taste itself is something that can and must evolve with time, education and experience.

However, taste must begin where you are. And this is the important part. Taste should be built honestly and authentically onto your natural aesthetic tendencies. Anything else will result in a rather pretentious “acquired taste” forced by social pressure, which might lead you to exactly the reasons why art collecting is scary to begin with.

If you follow your own genuine taste, you cannot begin in the wrong place.

Secondly, as just as important, one should go into a gallery with an open mind. Not too open, that one’s brain may fall out, but open enough to ask deeper layered questions, such as : “What does this artwork change inside of me?” , or “What does this artwork require of me?” .

These are the layers that deal with meaning, whereas before we only dealt with form. 

Here we can start to explore the tartness of art, that may be scary but also exciting and intriguing. For example I made a nude of this elderly woman, which I still consider as one of my most striking works. It has been incredible watching women engage with this work. Some were downright repulsed by this picture, which isn’t at all grotesque in any way. The image itself merely depicts a woman, in her own body. But suddenly this work took a whole new life, one given to it by the viewers themselves! This image conflicts, contorts and confronts something that is very deeply sensitive for so many women: the aging of their body. To therefore see it, so blatantly exposed, unashamed, in full colour, has triggered deeply seated personal emotions in all these women.

 
So why would anyone buy such a painting? One that goes against your entire taste and aesthetic?
Well, the answer lies in the question itself: because it does just that. 

Interestingly enough, the things that bother us, and I mean genuinely trigger a profound response in us, tend to be as intimate and unique as our very taste, or many times even more so! Because other people, given the exact same image are not bothered at all.

And so a whole new set of questions arise: Why do I have such a strong response to this?

By acquiring a work that is therefore more challenging, we may start a whole process of self-discovery we didn’t even know we needed.

I don’t take this lightly at all, and neither should you, by the way. It takes an enormous amount of courage to even go to such depths. It takes strength to be able to self-reflect and even open up that part of oneself. More importantly, this could become a whole source of later conversations with other people. If this work is in your home, every person who is invited in that space will have their reactions to it and spark potentially even deeper conversations. 

At least this is what art or some forms of art used to do for us. And I personally believe we must desperately go back to exactly that place.

Art as a means to deeper truths.

Now of course, art can also be fun, quirky, or jesty and not at all serious. And that will pertain to those types of people. My art however tries to peel at what makes us human, and because of it, it requires a certain amount of courage to join in that journey. 

So begin with what stays with you! Because that is an important key to getting to know yourself at deeper levels. Learn to distinguish between shock value, instant attraction and true lasting resonance. 

This is most certainly a mix of aesthetic and meaning that challenges you in some way, as it helps to expand you, not merely validate. 

Set a Budget Without Shame

This may sound so foreign that it may even feel bizarre, but it is the reality of most art collectors who don’t have an infinity symbol on their credit cards.

We save up for a car, a new kitchen, or a holiday without giving it a second thought. These are normal and accepted joys of being an adult and being able to make such financial choices.

However, when it comes to art, because of this imposed cultural confusion, most people feel like they don’t have permission to create a budget solely for art. Because why would you? Art has been declared a “non-essential item,” and the world has believed in this theory.

Conversely, I would argue quite the opposite. Everything we aspire to do seems directly tied to art. We save up for a nice car, not a bad-looking one. We want a vacation with nature, beautiful surroundings, nice hotels: a designed experience. We buy designer bags or clothes — again, art, but in wearable form. All of these consumable forms of artistic design are heavily endorsed and validated as socially acceptable forms of expenditure in capitalism, but fine art itself is not. Why?

It is just a step further than the aforementioned. It is the step beyond mere design, a step towards yourself. Why should this particular step be, ironically, the only step not worth including in your adult life as seriously as all others?

And that, too, would include a budget.

It is not a small feat to realise that art may in fact deserve a more important place in your life than you had previously considered. We experienced this during Covid. Suddenly, people were met by their empty houses. What should have been homes, spaces which marry safety with identity, revealed themselves to be rather neutral spaces. Ones that don’t “bother the eye”, but might be fairly insipid because of it.

This fear of “what will others think”, which has invaded our homes alongside the idea that one’s private home should somehow always be marketable and rentable, and therefore neutral, has severed our relationship with our own spaces.

This isn’t decor we’re talking about. It is quite directly an extension of yourself, and that too deserves a bit more care and attention.

Understand Why Original Art Costs What It Costs

In my article “Should Art be Expensive?” I go at length into this subject, but for our needs right now I will address what original artwork is, or specifically here, what a painting is in terms of cost.

A painting is a surface with the highest amount of human attention and dedication per square inch that can ever exist.

Aside from the metaphysics of it, art is simply expensive to produce. Unlike other forms of art, visual art has the unfortunate circumstance of requiring a lot of funds to be able to even practice. Where a pianist might simply redo all the scales and keep practising, a painter would have lost a whole lot of paint and canvases just to get to a place that can be considered more mature art.

These hidden costs are almost never taken into consideration in the fine arts, even though we do so in all other professions. We understand how expensive it can be to become a doctor, or a lawyer or an architect, but we might not instinctively see the true cost of becoming a painter or worse still, a sculptor.

A painting might therefore be “just a few lines”, but I can assure you, those lines cover the cost of years of other lines that were not quite right, and the cost of which is always borne by the artist alone.

When you are acquiring an original artwork, you are not merely buying one painting or one work, you are in fact buying into a whole practice, its past, present and future! Also unlike most professions, artists’ revenue goes almost entirely and exclusively back into making art. Not fancy cars, nor houses, nor vacations, with the few exceptions that confirm this rule. Income goes straight back into more practice, more artworks, more shows and ultimately more culture!

Permission to begin

After years of encounters with art collectors and non collectors alike, I came to realise that a lengthy explanation for the permission of art is required, which has been the motivation of this article.

So, have this space. Be brave. Have the courage to express yourself through fine art, especially in a world where neutrality is so often mandated.

Budget this investment into yourself: into the development of your own taste, your self-discovery, and the atmosphere of the life you are building.

Starting an art collection does not require certainty. It requires attention. Begin with the work that stays with you, the image that keeps asking something of you, the piece that makes your own space feel more alive. Expertise can come later. The first act is much simpler, and much braver: allow yourself to care.