How I'd Start an Art Collection Today

You do not need a fortune or an art history degree to begin. You need patience, and the confidence to buy what you actually love.

By Nicole Junkermann

People often tell me they would love to collect art but assume it is a world closed to them, reserved for the very rich or the very expert. I understand the feeling, and I think it is mostly wrong. Some of the most rewarding collections I know were started with very little money and no special training, by people who simply paid attention and trusted their own eye. If you have ever been tempted, here is how I would begin today.

Look far more than you buy

Before spending anything, spend time. The best preparation for collecting is looking, a lot, at as much as you can: in public galleries, in small commercial ones, in the back rooms and group shows that cost nothing to walk into. Looking widely is how you find out what genuinely moves you, rather than what you think should. By the time you make a first purchase, you want to have seen hundreds of works and to know, roughly, what keeps pulling you back.

Buy what you love, not what you are told to

The most important rule is also the simplest. Buy what you love, not what someone has told you is important, and not what you suspect might rise in value. A collection built around your own taste will give you pleasure every day on the wall, whatever happens to its price. A collection built around tips and trends tends to age badly and please no one, least of all its owner. If you ever have to choose between the clever purchase and the one you cannot stop thinking about, choose the one you cannot stop thinking about.

Start with affordable forms

You do not have to begin with a major painting. Some of the most generous entry points into collecting are the more affordable forms: prints and editions, works on paper, drawings, and photography. These let you live with real, original work, often by serious artists, for a fraction of the cost of a unique canvas. Starting here is not a compromise. It is how a great many fine collections actually began.

Back living artists

There is a particular pleasure, and I think a quiet responsibility, in supporting artists who are alive and working now. Buying from an emerging artist or a small studio does something a later resale never can: it helps someone keep making the work. You also tend to buy guided only by your own response, before anyone else has decided what the work is worth. Some of my favourite pieces are ones I bought simply because I believed in the person who made them.

Patience beats speed

Collecting rewards patience far more than speed. There is no prize for assembling a great deal of art quickly, and a lot of regret waiting for those who try. Better to buy slowly, live with each piece, and let your eye sharpen between purchases. A gap on the wall is not a failure. It is space held open for the right thing, which is usually worth the wait.

Care for the work, and keep good records

The unglamorous part matters too. Keep a simple record of what you have bought, from whom, and for how much, with anything the artist or gallery tells you about it. Look after the work properly, away from harsh light and damp. None of this is difficult, and all of it protects both the pleasure and the value of what you are building. A collection that is well cared for and well documented is simply a happier thing to own.

Let the collection find its shape

Finally, do not over‑plan. The best collections are not designed in advance; they reveal themselves over time. Buy honestly, piece by piece, and after a while you will look up and notice a thread running through everything you have chosen, something about your own eye you could not have named at the start. Let that pattern emerge rather than forcing it. That slow act of discovery is, for me, the deepest pleasure of collecting at all. If you would like the longer version, I have written in more detail about how I would start an art collection, and I keep the rest of my notes on collecting and looking at nicolejunkermann.info.

Nicole Junkermann

Nicole Junkermann is an entrepreneur, investor and longstanding supporter of the arts. She writes about collecting, exhibitions and the pleasure of looking, for general readers, at nicolejunkermann.info.