How to start a collection 1/2
Tips to kick off a meaningful collection that reflects your personality.
SPOILER ALERT: If you are NOT a first-time or emerging collector, this might not be the right article for you. The strategies we advise for first time collectors and confirmed collectors are quite different. A second article will be published for confirmed collectors soon.
If, on the contrary, you have always enjoyed art, or been intrigued by it, and wondered what it would be like to have some art in your home or office, but often felt overwhelmed by the art market and were therefore never convinced enough to acquire art yourself, then you are at the right spot: "There is so much art I like, I don't know where to start!", "What if I overpay for the artwork I chose?", "How am I sure this is the right fit?", "I like this artwork in that gallery, but I don't know how to approach them", "I want to start a collection but how do I start?" If this sounds familiar, keep reading.
The most common advices you will hear or read when starting an art collection are: "Collect what you love" or "Start defining your style or taste". These are technically not bad advices, but they do have some strong limitations:
- First, when you start collecting art, you might not be fully aware of what your taste is. You might walk through an art fair saying "I love this" versus "I don't like this", but after a few hours of touring, you might have loved a bit too many artworks for your wallet. So what then? Love is not enough in the art market, plus, it can lead to quite boring picks according to collector Erlin Kagge...
- Second, defining a style takes time. If you are not used to seeing a lot of art, it might be challenging to say right away what all your "likes" have in common. You need to go to exhibitions, attend gallery openings, museums, art fairs etc. and you have to read a lot if you want to better understand why you like certain artworks and why some might be worth your consideration and others not. Educating yourself in art is an infinite mission: we educate ourselves until we die.
- Third, and you might limit yourself once you define your taste: Once you have identified your style, and may even be able to qualify it (ex.: abstract landscapes), you might be so excited that your attention will focus only on this style. You will be more inclined to buy an artwork just because it is your style and in your price range rather than consider all other factors (artist's statement and career, real market value, investment potential, context, impact...). You might not see with a same eye other artworks and therefore miss some great opportunities. You may end up being stuck in your own style. For instance, if you realized that you like abstract landscapes, you might be tempted to buy several in a row…which might end up being pretty boring.
- Fourth, style and taste evolve with time: Trust that your eye and taste will become sharper and edgier with time. What you love today might not provoke the same emotions in you in five or ten years. So don't become too bulimic with your abstract landscapes, you may want to give them away one day...
Of course, we can help you navigate all these challenges: defining your style today, developing your art education, trying to anticipate your next moves, helping you to evolve and grow your collection with time to avoid boring or repetitive schemes. Feel free to reach out to us for help on this!
Meanwhile, here is another trick to help you pick the right artworks among the very overwhelming amount of works on the market: Instead of asking yourself “what’s my style or taste?”, ask yourself “What’s my Story?" Asking yourself what you want to tell those who will see the artwork (family, friends, colleagues, other collectors, artists...) or what you want to be reminded of everyday is a much more powerful and interesting way to build a collection that is coherent and unique but diversified at the same time. We will help you write Your (his)Story. Here are a couple of questions to start with:
- Background: Where did I grow up? What was my childhood like? What reminds me of my childhood?
- Community: Who is my family? Who is my community? Who are my friends and why? Where do I belong to?
- Education: What reminds me of school or college? What language(s) do I speak?
- Work: What is my professional environment? What are my professional motivations or goals?
- Personal development: What are my challenges? How do I see the past/present/future?
- Global interests & concerns: What do I care about? What worries me? What message do I want to share with the world?
These questions can sound conceptual at the beginning and hard to relate to any artwork. But we can help you identify the right artworks to tell Your Story. For instance, if you a LatinX Millennial who grew up between his Latin home city and the Bronx, working in tech today and worried about robot ethics and consumerism, we could lead you to see works by Andrew Roberts or Jacky Connolly, for example. Roberts is a young artist born in Mexico, who likes to use video art to denounce big tech or industrial companies and brands that step on individual freedoms. Connolly is a young artist from New York who uses different forms of technology, including AI images and "deep fake' to question our sense of reality and surroundings.
(c) Jacky Connolly, Descent into Hell, 2021, Still from Four-channel high-definition video, color, sound, 33-57min, Whitney Museum, New York.
Once you have identified some answers to your main question "What is My Story?", you can transform them into concrete steps to buy works that will constitute your first collector base, at a budget and size you are comfortable with:
- Start with something you care about: whether it is a specific existing or fictive person, whether cats, environment or community, start noticing what makes you feel alive;
- Start with something familiar or makes you feel good, maybe that reminds you of your childhood, a good memory, vacation or person;
- Chose a format that speaks to you: painting, sculpture, photography (note that photographs, prints and drawings are usually more affordable than paintings and sculptures if you are on a budget);
- It's ok to start small: first purchases might not be the best. You can have buyer’s remorse months or years later, in particular as your taste will evolve. This is why it’s good to keep those firsties small. But if you don’t like them, don’t hate them. It is great to look back to some first pieces and smile at them, acknowledging: “Well, these were not my best picks”, this is how you know you are getting better and are on the right path! Don’t give up and continue exploring new horizons.
A French-Senegalese New York-based collector has been hesitating for years about acquiring a contemporary art piece, after years of collecting traditional aquarelle portraits or postwar acrylic paintings form Senegal, such as by Souleymane Keita. She discovered Mirtho Linguet, a French-Guianese photographer, through his photographies " Mental Cide" in 2018 and immediately fell in love with it (see image below). It deeply resonated with her own story and journey emigrating from Senegal to France, and suffering from a handicap ever since she was a child. Even if Linguet's work moved her deeply, she still wasn't able to make the step towards a contemporary art piece. She had to wait an important birthday celebration for her closed ones to decide to acquire one for her. Once she artwork was delivered at her home, she realized there was no doubts about it fitting perfectly within her home and with the other more traditional pieces, as it was reflecting her very own story.
In other words, whatever your taste, remember that you are unique: your choices reflect your personal background, identity, experiences and thoughts, even the darkest ones. So if you are true to yourself, your collection will be unique as well. It will reflect Your unique Story.
Once you have acquired one or more smaller pieces that you are comfortable with, and which constitute a first a collectors “base”, you will progressively start moving out of your comfort zone, exploring new formats, new subjects, new perspectives that even make you uncomfortable. This is when collections really get exciting: they reflect the collector’s doubts, fears, grey zones. But more on this in another upcoming article, dedicated to confirmed collectors - subscribe here.
Meanwhile, get in touch with us to start writing Your Story!
What kind Art Collector are you? Get a personalized analysis by participating in our Collector's Quiz here.
TOUKAN - Collector's Blog
What kind of Collector are you?
Get a personalized analyses by participating in our Collector's Quiz here.
