Design

She can get into any gallery in the city but she's afraid to buy anything because she doesn't know what she's looking at

The art world is built on making you feel like taste is a gift rather than a skill. Gifts are rare. Skills are learnable. Learnable is bad for an industry that profits from your uncertainty, which is why nobody told you the bad painting is the cost of admission.

, and Adrienne Berry

January 22, 2026

7 min read

I once bought a terrible painting in 2019, and I need to tell you about it because the shame is instructive.

Paid real money for it, hung it above the sofa, rearranged the furniture around it like it was a new baby. Told anyone who'd listen about the artist with the breathless intensity of a woman who had just discovered she had an eye. I did not have an eye. I had enthusiasm and a credit card, which is a dangerous combination in a Boston gallery on a Saturday when the light is doing that thing, and the gallerist is doing that other thing where she makes you feel like you've been personally selected for something.

Six months later, the painting was in the hallway. A year later, it lived behind the coats. Somewhere around month eighteen, I gave it to a friend who was decorating her first home and described the artist as "really emerging" instead of what he actually was: a week's worth of salary.

Every woman I know who now owns art that stops people in their tracks has a version of this story, and every woman I know who still has blank walls is trying to skip it, and you can't. The bad painting is the cost of admission, and nobody in the art world will tell you this because embarrassment is the one currency they don't trade in publicly, though privately, over wine, they'll confess to purchases that would make your decorating mistakes look like acts of genius.

The fear makes sense, and it's still ruining your walls

Art is the only purchase that functions as a personality test hung in your living room for everyone to evaluate, and this is why it's scarier than anything else you buy.

A mediocre sofa is just a mediocre sofa. Nobody walks into your home, clocks the sectional, and forms a theory about your inner life. But a mediocre painting is a signed confession. It announces your taste to everyone who enters the room, and taste, unlike money, has this terrible reputation for being something you either have or don't.