Are you a retired billionaire in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce gliding through unlimited leisure hours? Or perhaps a bespectacled scholar with a PhD in Pre-Raphaelite woodcuts from the Sorbonne? You’re not? Well, I’m not either. We don’t have to be. If you’re hungry to look and discover, comfortable with a little risk in the name of pleasure, and ready to pony up some cash, I’ve got good news: You can be an art collector.

Some articles suggest that the next generation of collectors must come from families that already collect. But there are as many ways to be a collector as there are to make a collection. What matters is what you bring to it.

I’ve had an unorthodox path to art. I had no background, connections, or family in the art world. I’ve been a songwriter and a gambler. I started collecting in my twenties when I met an artist in a poker game.

It turns out great collectors haven’t all been insiders. The Vogels amassed amazing postwar art while Dorothy Vogel was a librarian and her husband, Herb, a postal clerk. Ethel and Robert Scull, who championed Pop Art, owned taxis. Gallerist and collector Larry Gagosian started as a poster salesman. It does take some money to be able to start collecting, but a lot less than it’s made to seem. Sure, you can wait till you’re wealthy and retired, but you don’t have to. Some amazing collections have been made along the way, with limited resources and great eyes. 

So why would you collect? It’s a stupid word, honestly. Collector. It doesn’t do justice to what’s inside. It feels like ‘accumulator,’ and who wants to be that? In this economy? But living with meaningful objects is an experience that makes us human.

We’re increasingly inundated with messages about ‘minimal living’ and the ‘rental economy.’ 

‘Young people just want experiences,’ says the wealthy boomer pundit to an entire generation now realizing they’ll have to give up on home ownership. ‘Downsize your life,’ writes the publishing executive from her third house in the Hamptons. ‘Imagine no possessions,’ sing the technocrat overlords who possess everything. Even your time, even your attention.

In exactly this moment it’s especially nourishing to live with art that’s meaningful to you. While restaurants fill with robots and screens fill with slop, I imagine this feeling will grow.

Collecting isn’t choosing objects over experiences – it is the experience! I’ve made friends in Tokyo and Turkey. Had group chats with London and phone calls with Amsterdam. Have gone to openings in Mexico and spent hours debating Italian Baroque in Paris. The way I felt looking at the first painting I hung in my one-room apartment, awestruck to be living with something so moving – I still get that feeling every day. There’s no experience like living with art, surrounded by the hands of artists and movements of history and memories of how it got there. In a world becoming isolated and robotic, it’s intimate and human.