Advice on Buying Art

Alan Bamberger writes an article on art collecting that offers a very reasoned and lucid set of questions that prospective collectors should ask themselves when buying art. Bamberger is a San Francisco based art consultant whose website offers lots of good counsel and common sense for both artists and collectors.

Having said that, I would point out that using Bamberger's advice a collector of the 1890s would have been wise to ignore Vincent Van Gogh, who was an unknown artist, working in an idiosyncratic style, had been largely self-taught and who was recommended by almost no one. And similarly, we would judge based on Bamberger's advice that Damiem Hirst is "it," being the highest paid, living artist in the history of mankind. But Hirst is not it. He is the art version of a junk bond.

Bamberger is giving first rate advice in his piece. But the missing element is taste, intelligence, sensibility, having good hunches, having a great eye ... is all tied up with some kind of je ne sais quoi logic that combines various felicitous abilities. Buying really fine quality art involves one in an intellectual quest for which no amount of advice from the status quo can help. It's a little like getting married. Your relatives can all weigh in with their two cents, but it's your heart.

Knowing how to see the kind of powerful visual idea that will be tomorrow's acclaimed masterpiece means being in the right place at the right time (for buying a Van Gogh in 1890 it would have meant being in France and being friendly with Theo Van Gogh) and having a strong inner sense of what constitutes both beauty and meaning.

However, this is not a bad outcome. We were meant to wonder about these things and to search for them.

Otherwise, I'd say heed Bamberger's advice. Buy things you love. Make certain of their pedigree with as much information as you can get. But if you want to buy truly great art, the kind that is "boldly going where no one has gone before," you have to step outside the comfort zone of the status quo and go with your gut. And your luck!

[The painting that illustrates this post is by Ignacio Iturria, contemporary Uraguayan painter.]

The Fine Art of Art Collecting

The first wise rule of collecting is to start with beauty. Try to find it, try to understand it. It leads you into interesting discoveries about yourself, as you find out what kind of beauty speaks to you. It also leads you into an education in what has been beautiful in the history of man, during different times, in different cultures.

The first stop in one's education about beauty needs to be a museum. However, for many people there isn't a world class museum next door. The alternate place to learn is a library that has strong holdings in art history books. Barring that, the internet.

Many artists begin their own education with reproductions of masterworks. They assemble works they love on the studio wall, sometimes in reproductions the size of a postcard. Collectors might be wise to begin their own search in a similar manner. Before you buy real art, start collecting reproductions (including ones printed off the internet) to use in adorning your wall with images that have meaning for you. It's the first step in connoisseurship that ultimately leads to buying real works.

That said, consider this: the Degas at the top of this post is already in a museum and would be beyond the financial resources of most collectors even if it were on the market. But the nude drawn with sanguine conte by Don Srull that I saw recently in a regional art venue was priced at $300. It's a beautiful work. Whether Srull will make future works as valuable as Degas is uncertain, perhaps unlikely. But he has already assimilated certain characteristics of figure drawing, learned ideas from predecessors like Degas which he translates with wonderful and sensitive mastery.

If I wanted an elegant, classic image for my living room, I would invest $300 in a work like this.

I am not arguing that buying a beautiful drawing like this one is the end product of collecting. Quite the contrary, this might be the wise first step.

To see some paintings in my own collection, click here.

The Art of Collecting Art

Art collecting need not be as perilous as this [Pieter Bruegel, Blind leading the blind. 1568. Galleria Nazionale, Naples ] Though it could be. Depends upon what your goals are.

I recently saw an article on the subject in a recent Charlotte Observer. Also the internet is ripe with advice sites, here's one. I offer my own advice which is better advice than what you'll get from the others.

Buy what you like. And be careful what you like. If you like Ellsworth Kelly, try liking something else instead. Click to see why. Kelly's works sell for astronomical amounts and are bad investments, unless you are very rich and need a short-term alternative to currency for use in moving money around.

But if you love art, you should in general avoid Kelly and similar artists who do things you can easily do yourself. You can make your own Ellsworth Kelly; so if you like solid colors, you're wise to make your own Kelly. Then you can make it in any color and any size you please. You don't even have to call it a "Kelly." You can take all the credit for it yourself.

A corollary of this rule goes thusly, and we'll call it a first rule for collectors: "Don't believe everything people tell you." If the art work looks stupid, it probably is stupid.

If you are not sure how to recognize something stupid, ask an ordinary person. Do not ask anyone with a Ph.D in contemporary art history, especially if they spent a lot of money for their education. They have too much face to save and too much invested in defending the status quo.

More advice, next post.