How to Buy Your First Artwork
Buying a first piece is mostly a sequence of decisions, and each one has a right question attached to it. These guides take that sequence in order: what you can spend, what a price should look like, what to ask a seller, what paperwork to request, and what to check before the money moves.
Every guide ends with a checklist you can keep open in a tab while you talk to a seller. We don't work for galleries or auction houses, and we don't tell you what to like. We tell you what to verify.
Newest Guides
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A private consultation is a working session, not a sales pitch. Here is what an adviser asks, what they produce, how the fee structures differ and when hiring o
Read guide →Buying art online safely
Most of the art market now runs through a screen, which removes the one check buyers used to rely on. Here is how to verify a seller, read condition remotely an
Read guide →Emerging art price index: how prices actually move
Art price indices look authoritative and rest on thinner data than most readers assume. This is how they are built, what they leave out and what they can honest
Read guide →How to choose your first painting
The first painting is the one people overthink most. This guide covers how to test a genuine reaction against a passing one, what practical questions matter and
Read guide →Short Answers, Recently Added
All Primer Notes →Why We Wrote These
Most art writing is aimed at people who already know how a sale works. It assumes you know what a condition report is, why an invoice needs a title and a date on it, and what to do when a gallery says a work is "on hold". If nobody has walked you through that once, the whole thing looks like a members-only club with unwritten rules.
So we write the rules down. Each guide is the version we wished someone had handed us before a first purchase: the order to do things in, the exact wording of what to ask, and the answers that should make you walk away. Some platforms we mention pay us a commission, and we label those links where they appear. Meet the people writing this.
What to Do Next
Open the first guide and work through it in order. If you would rather be reminded when the next one lands, leave your email above.
Get the First Purchase Checklist
One free PDF, four pages: a budget worksheet, the questions to ask before you pay, the paperwork to request, and the red flags that mean stop.
Download the checklist