When you buy a German sports car or Italian leather shoes or an Armani suit or a plastic spatula from Target, for that matter, you are buying objects that were mass produced. Even the really expensive items on that list were made in large volumes.
When you buy an original piece of art, you are getting the one and only piece like it, on the entire planet, in the history of the planet, and for all time.
That’s a pretty exclusive deal.
But buying art is even more significant than that. When you buy an original work by an artist who’s career you are following, you are getting something that is a snap shot of his life at that moment. You are buying what this artist decided to create out of the infinite number of options available to him. Most people who create things for a living don’t have much say in what they are going to create or when or how many of them they will produce. But artists are different. They listen only to their creative spirit when conceiving of their next work. They do sketches, they revise the sketches, they daydream about the idea, they mull it over with a glass of wine or a cup of coffee. They sleep on the idea. They wake up with a new perspective. Eventually, they start in on the work. Maybe it starts off smoothly, maybe not. Maybe they are soaring one minute and doubting it the next. They keep working at it. It turns a corner. Soon, they know its going to work. They stay with it, and keep working on it until its finished. And there it is, this creation that they cared about enough to nurture into existence from thin air. Completely original. Buying art is
