How To Buy ArtWhen you have developed your incipient "A.Q." to the point where you are ready to buy, it is time to set yourself some general goal. A highly personal factor now enters the scene. You will buy the pictures and buy art to enjoy for yourself; they will be chosen to provide beautiful objects for your family and friends. It is thus evident that you will have to depend a great deal on your personal knowledge and tastes. It would be difficult for any book to give you concrete and infallible direction at this highly crucial point in your metamorphosis from interested (and innocent) bystander to active collector. But I do have some pointers which can serve you as a guide in finally reaching the status of relative connoisseur.
First, I am going to reiterate a rule which you must have heard a dozen times if you have sought advice in the matter of buying pictures. I am going to restate it, nonetheless. Because, if, perchance, you never were exposed to the dictum, I should be shortchanging you by taking it for granted. The fundamental rule is this: if you don't like it ... don't buy it! An easy precept to follow? Not always. Many's the bargain that will appeal to you purely on materialistic grounds. Many's the dealer who will inspire you with stories of pictures which were bought against a man's better taste, and later became memorabilia in the art world. I warn you, without reservation. If you don't like it . . . Don't buy it! Remember: the picture will be in your home. You will pass it a hundred times every week. You will sit near it, turn to it, think about it. Where's the sense and the true pleasure of art collecting if the work means no more than a purchase to line your coffers? Frame a hundred shares of AT&T, and you have achieved the same purpose 1 But, even in the mundane business of buying art for increment, you face a danger when you place the speculative future value of the purchase above its intrinsic desirability as a work of art. You lay yourself open to a very common practice that has been a sad experience for many new collectors, and a few older ones, who never recognized that the "A.Q." is the real essence of a collector's equipment. You will succumb to autograph collecting, rather than art collecting. |