Starting a collection

The people with the best collections are almost never the ones who spent the most. They are the ones who decided early what they were not going to buy.

The rule comes before the first purchase

One material, one decade, one city, one subject, one printing process. The narrower it is, the better the collection will be, and the reason is mechanical rather than aesthetic: a rule forces you to compare like with like, and comparison is the only way anybody learns to see.

A house full of the best of everything reads as a showroom, because nothing in it is in conversation with anything else. Twelve works that share a constraint make each other more interesting, and the twelfth is better than the first because you knew more by then.

Before buying anything

What a good gallery does

• Answers what a work costs without being asked twice.
• Tells you what else the artist has available and at what level, rather than only what is on the wall.
• Explains provenance and condition without being pushed.
• Says when something is not right for you, which is the single strongest signal you have found a good one.
• Offers to hold a work for a day so you can think.

What a poor one does is create urgency, mention the waiting list, refer vaguely to institutional interest and decline to discuss price in front of other people. All four are sales technique and none of them are about the work.

The money, plainly

Almost nothing bought for a house is an investment. Design classics roughly track inflation. Contemporary art at the entry level is illiquid and the resale, if any, is at auction with a twenty-five to thirty per cent buyer's premium sitting on top of the hammer price and a seller's commission underneath it.

The correct posture is to buy at a price that would not upset you if the artist stopped working tomorrow and the market forgot them. If it appreciates, that is a fact you find out later and it should change nothing about whether the thing is on your wall.