We are not talking about the imposing abstract meant to pull the room together. We are not talking about the beige textured canvas that exists solely so the wall isn't naked. That isn't art. That is distinctively expensive wallpaper, and the decorator who suggested it knows the difference even if she didn't say so.
We are talking about the moment you stand in front of something and feel your chest tighten. The piece you keep thinking about three days later. The work that makes you feel slightly less alone in a way you cannot explain and do not need to.
You want that on your walls. You know you want it. But when it comes to actually buying, you freeze.
The prices seem untethered from anything you can evaluate. The gallerists speak a language you half-understand. You don't know if the artist is important or will be important or is the kind of important that only exists inside a very small room of people who went to the same four graduate programs. You worry about buying something that reveals you as a person who doesn't know what she's doing. So you buy nothing. Or you buy something safe. Or you wait until you "know more," a day that never quite arrives.
Here's what nobody tells you: the eye gets trained by buying, not by waiting.
What you're actually afraid of
Let's name it. You're afraid of buying something that a more sophisticated person would recognize as a mistake.
