I have not bought my first piece yet, but this is where I have landed so far: The timing is unusually good. About a trillion dollars of art is coming loose as the boomers pass theirs down, the heirs mostly don't want it. Museums won't take the overflow, so most of it goes to estate liquidators who move volumes. Bloomberg put it bluntly:

Which is a polite way of saying a lot of art is about to be mispriced, in public, at scale. So I mapped out the four ways you can actually buy a piece:

Auction, arguably the worst place to start for your first piece. The hammer price is not what you pay: the house adds 27–28% on top, then VAT on that fee, so you're a third above your own bid. The seller pays another 10–15%, so the house gets paid from both ends of the same painting.

Galleries, take about half. Fifty-fifty is standard, sometimes sixty-forty if the artist has leverage. Sounds brutal, but that half is building the artist a career, and it's buying you provenance and someone who picks up the phone.

The studio, where the work was made, and the artist keeps nearly all of it. Ask for an invoice and a certificate, paperwork is the one thing a gallery hands you without being asked and a studio does not.

Degree shows (art students exhibit their final work when they graduate), which almost nobody goes to. Nobody has heard of them yet, which is exactly why it's cheaper. Maybe the perfect place to begin as a first time buyer.

My POV: The further you get from the artist, the more you pay and the less the artist keeps. But wherever you buy, you're buying into the same illiquid market. So for the moment, I would buy with my heart and my heart only, and as close I could come to the artist.

I went looking for the financial case, and its not really in the art. From what I gathered, art is a mediocre investment and an excellent wrapper.

Almost all of the financial value comes from what you can do around the asset, not from the asset appreciating (for most pieces). Art has no yield, real carry costs (insurance, climate storage, conservation), transaction costs, and it's illiquid. There are some art indices, built on works that sold; and that's a problem because most don't sell. And therefore indices tend to flatter reality slightly. Needless to say, tax and law differs alot from geographical location.

So then why do rich people keep buying it?

Borrowing. There's about $35–40 billion lent against art now, up from $8 billion a decade ago. Loans aren't income, so nothing gets taxed for now.

Donating. Sounds easy, but the museum has to actually want it, and increasingly it doesn't. If they accept and hang it up, you deduct what it's worth today, including the gain you never paid tax on.

Inheriting. In the US, art left to heirs has its whole gain wiped, essentially decades of appreciation, never taxed. The tax rules obviously vary within the EU, but in Norway it runs the other way around, you inherit the original purchase price, and gain comes with the painting.

Storing. Freeports in Geneva, Luxembourg and Singapore, where work sits with tax deferred more or less indefinitely and changes owners without ever entering a country. Two million square feet of it, and nobody is looking at any of it.

Leasing. If you buy a painting for your company there are no benefits, because tax law says good art never wears out. Lease the same painting and every payment comes off your taxable income, with the option to buy it at residual value at the end.

So art might not be that beneficial in itself, but the paperwork around it is.

Women are the fastest-growing group of collectors, and we buy differently (probably better hehe). We want more women artists, more variety, less loyalty to whatever the last generation decided was important.

Across 1.9 million auction sales in 49 countries, work by women sells for about 42% less. Researchers then ran an experiment where people couldn't tell who had made the piece, and the discount disappeared. But the gap is closing, since women are increasingly doing the buying.

Some female artists that caught my attention: Diane Chappalley, Rachel Jones, Tina Bobbe, Jadé Fadojutimi.

My POV is that below a few thousand euros, there is no exit, which essentially means this price range isn't an investment at all.

The wrapper arguments above mostly kick in at scale; borrowing, donating and freeports need a collection behind them. Leasing is the exception worth remembering if you have a company, it works from the first piece, nut none of it is a reason to buy the first piece. So a better strategy might be to buy art you love.