Budget is not the obstacle
The belief that buying art takes thousands of euros keeps more people away than anything else. The entry level of the contemporary market is wide and real: our 131 available works run from €40 to €280, signed, by 15 different authors.
Buy what you can live with
The first rule is also the only one that really matters: buy something you are willing to look at every day for years. A piece chosen because it "should appreciate", which you do not like, is a bad deal even if it appreciates — because in the meantime it lives with you.
Look a lot before you buy
Training your eye is free. One public collection seen slowly teaches more than ten hurried purchases: you learn to recognise when a composition holds, when a black and white has depth, when a colour is decisive and when it is merely loud.
The questions to ask, every time
- What technique is it? Photographic print, mixed media, painting — different things at different prices.
- Unique piece or part of an edition? And if an edition, of how many.
- Is it signed, and where? Front, back, pencil or ink.
- What exactly is the format? In centimetres, not "medium".
- What arrives at my door? Framed, unframed, rolled in a tube or flat.
A serious seller answers all five without hesitating. The hesitation is the information.
The mistakes that cost
Buying in a rush on the last day of a show. Buying to fill a wall of a specific size instead of choosing the work and then solving the wall. Buying a very large edition believing it is a limited one. And forgetting to budget for framing, which for an entry-level work can exceed the price of the work itself.
Where to actually start
If you have no idea where to begin: pick one medium, look at fifty examples of it, then buy the one you still remember the next day. It is a banal method and it works.