Art collecting is love, and love isn’t always easy. The first encounter, a spark. Fascination. The quickening of pulses and shortness of breath. Intoxication in its presence. Then balancing passion and material reality, surface beauty or depth of emotion. Sometimes it startles or offends you, but you can’t stop thinking about it and need to see it again. Sometimes you love at first sight, but can’t make it stay. The one that wasn’t meant to be, the one that got away. It’s right here looking back at you. And then it’s history.

Maybe art collecting once seemed like love from Victorian novels. Like meeting in-laws of a higher social class who look down their noses at you and resent your intrusive presence, love meant following their arbitrary rules for acceptance. No longer.

This is about the door opening to the first studio visit that transforms how you see the world. Or the back room of an Art Basel fair booth where the drawing you spent years searching for stops you in your tracks. This is for anyone who’s curious and wants to take time to see.

What makes collecting fun is the same thing that makes it painful – choices. It’d be easy to guess that collecting is about being the richest person in the room and buying everything there. But that’s better described as hoarding. Each tone a singer sings or way a painter flicks her brush defines the voice of the artwork. Your collection is the choices you make. The bright portrait or the subdued abstract? The watercolor or the set of prints? The salon hang hitting minor notes or the whole budget blown on one shining masterpiece? Your choices will be filled with mistakes, learning, changes of taste, and regrets that are beautiful too. You start in an instant and discover over a lifetime. There’s no finish line.

You can never get art collecting right, all you can do is get it. And when you get it, BAM! Sometimes it’s an epiphany. I once had one standing in front of Giacometti’s The Palace at 4 a.m. (1932) with thunderclaps and symphonies in my head. Other times it creeps up slowly, like seeing the first painting I’d ever buy in a show by Henry Taylor, not knowing that it would keep me company through years and studio apartments and kitchens and cross-country moves and houseguests and heartbreaks and museum shows and back. I just thought: I love this; I want to live with this.

Artworks have presence. They stare back at you and take up space in your home. Collecting becomes the story of your life. The choices you make and how you see the world. It’s a trip anybody can take. To start, all you have to do is the hardest thing of all: really look.