A handful of top art dealers in major Southern cities agree on this first principle for aspiring collectors: Before you buy, get smart. The best collectors are driven autodidacts who thirst for information about art, artists, and the art world. Here are their suggestions for educating yourself.
Take an art history course at a good university--or at least read classic books on the subject. Our editors recommend:
Gardner's Art Through the Ages,
The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Art,
and H.H. Arnason's History of Modern Art. All three are thorough, yet imminently readable, texts. These books are available through any online or bricks-and-mortar bookstore, or from your local library.
Visit galleries, exhibitions, auctions, and museums. The more you're exposed to great art, the better you'll recognize quality in emerging or more obscure artists.
Subscribe to the best art magazines. Try ARTnews, Art in America, or Art & Auction.
Or do as Memphis gallery owner Lisa Kurts suggests: get out of sitcom mode and watch art on TV. The PBS stations and the Arts & Entertainment channel air many specials on particular movements and artists. "It's a quick and easy way to build an awful lot of information," says Kurts, who is currently co-producing a film on Winslow Homer for PBS.
Knowing about art and the art scene, though, is only half the equation. The other half is knowing yourself. George Hemphill, owner of a Washington, D.C., gallery that deals in contemporary American art, often spurs clients along this path. "When we start working with someone who is new to art," Hemphill says, "we'll deliver to them four or five books that are more or less 'Art A to Z,' and we'll ask them to tag the things that they respond to, whether it's Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon or a Chagall painting or a Norman Rockwell.
"This is about narrowing taste and getting a real idea of what someone likes," Hemphill says. At the same time, he hopes clients will try to have an open mind and not be afraid to be challenged. "Taste is a terrible thing--it tells us not to look at things beyond where we've been trained," he says.
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