Don't Get Scammed Buying
Contemporary Art

“How do you not get scammed — or fooled — when you set out to buy contemporary art?” It is among the questions I am asked most often, and it is the right one to ask. Contemporary art is the easiest place in the market to feel out of your depth, because the usual instinct — is it beautiful? does it look well made? — is precisely the wrong tool for the job.

The reason is that contemporary art is conceptual: what you see is not what it refers to. A work is rarely about the thing it appears to depict. Judge it by its surface and you will misread it every time — and pay for the misreading. So I look at three things, in order, and the third is the one worth really understanding.

I. The First TwoCommentary, and metaphor

The first is the subject beneath the subject. Most contemporary art is a disquieting — often deliberately uncomfortable — commentary on a social or human condition. Before anything else, I want to understand what that commentary actually is: what the work is about, as opposed to what it shows. It matters that you know what you are looking at.

The second is metaphor, and here the materials do the talking. In contemporary art the materials are never neutral. Whether it is paint, or found material, or ordinary items the artist has incorporated into the work, every material is being used as a metaphor. So I ask how the artist is using them — what these particular materials are meant to carry. A material chosen for its meaning is a very different thing from one chosen because it was simply to hand.

II. The ThirdDoes the artist control the material?

The third takes a little more appreciation, and it is the one that separates a serious work from a gimmick: how well does the artist control his or her materials? It does not matter in the least what those materials are — it can be mud, it can be cow dung, it can be paint, it can be rice. What matters is whether the artist truly commands them — whether the technique is in full control of the material, or merely leaning on its novelty to do the work.

The material can be anything at all. The mastery cannot be faked — and that, in the end, is what you are paying for.

Put the three together — the commentary, the metaphor, and the control — and you have a way of looking that the hype cannot fool. You stop asking whether a contemporary work is pretty, and start asking what it means, how it means it, and whether the hand behind it is genuinely in command. Look that way, and you buy with your eyes open — never scammed, and never fooled.