Category Guide
Art Collecting
Building a meaningful art collection is one of the most rewarding things a serious collector can do. It requires developing an eye, understanding the market, and building relationships with galleries and artists over time. We cover the complete picture — from your first purchase to authenticating significant works.
How to Start Collecting Art: A Beginner's Guide to Your First Year
How to start collecting art: train your eye, choose a focus, set an annual budget, pick gallery, fair or auction, and a month-by-month plan for year one.
7 min readartArt Authentication and Provenance: How to Know If a Work Is Genuine
How art authentication works: catalogues raisonnés, foundations, scientific tests, provenance checks and stolen-art registers — and what to check.
8 min readartArt Fairs 2026–2027: Dates, Vetting and How to Buy Well
Major art fair dates for 2026–27 from the organisers, why fairs carry 35% of dealer sales, TEFAF vetting, and a fair-versus-auction price worked example.
8 min readTutorialHow to Buy Your First Artwork: A Step-by-Step Guide to Your First Art Purchase
Your first art purchase, step by step: training your eye, budget, questions for the gallery, documents, insurance, and an auction cost worked example.
7 min readWhat Actually Decides Value
The name on the work sets the ceiling. Almost everything else that decides what a piece is worth on the day you sell is documentary. An unbroken ownership chain, a catalogue raisonne entry, exhibition history, and a condition report that matches what the work looks like under raking light will move a price further than most buyers expect - and their absence will quietly remove a work from serious consideration regardless of who painted it.
That is why the guides here concentrate on the paperwork rather than on taste. Taste is yours to develop and nobody can sell it to you. Documentation is learnable, checkable before you commit, and it is the part that determines whether a collection can be insured, lent, inherited or resold without a specialist first spending a year reconstructing where everything came from.