Should you buy art you don’t like? - maybe yes.

Still Life with Apples (detail), 1893–94, Paul Cézanne, oil on canvas. The J. Paul Getty Museum

I met an art collector recently, though I should say that more correctly he was a buyer of art. He talked about things he had but then announced that he really knew nothing about them, didn’t much like them and only bought the works because he’d been advised that they would increase in value. Further, he said that there was some art he liked but he wouldn’t buy because he’d been told it had no investment potential.

I thought that this was interesting. He was flying squarely in the face of all traditional advice which has always been to buy the best of what you really love. You are trusting yourself and leveraging your passion. Maybe he’d looked at that sage advice and thought what can I do? I know I should have art but I don’t like it! Of course he’s not alone but the thing that differentiated this particular buyer from many others was his honesty. A lot of people feel very little when stood in front of even the best that humanity has produced but they rarely admit it.

While I admire his honesty I worry about his logic. When does a successful businessman decide that art, particularly speculative contemporary art is a good investment? It’s a legitimate question that every art dealer is asked from time to time. ‘Is this a good investment?’ There is a simple right answer and that is ‘I don’t know’. The slightly more obtuse answer is to point the buyer in the direction of price records which mostly tend to show a general upward trend and for many buyers in it for the long term, that is enough. But that only tells part of the story. If you’re buying for an investment then you already have half an eye on the sale and that is where the true collector differs. They are thinking only of the acquisition and any future sale couldn’t be of less interest to them. By pure accident, they are adding a layer of desirability to the object because that object is now unavailable.

There have always been collectors who looked at art from an investment perspective. Paul Getty famously said that ‘fine art is the finest investment’ but was he buying it as an investment? I would say definitely not but when he looked back it had done better than a many of the assets he had acquired, purely for that purpose. That is a tough act to follow and the world has changed.

Back to our man with the unloved art collection. Has he done the right thing in outsourcing his passion in the same way he outsources so many areas of a busy life? That comes down to the advice and to a degree the education he’s unwittingly receiving. If it’s well chosen he may start to find he likes to have it around and at that point he may stop caring about whether it goes up in value and that is the point when he gets a true return on his investment!