Why Is Buying a Couch Easy and a Painting So Hard?

I was on a Zoom recently with a gallerist I deeply respect. We were talking about something the emerging art world can’t stop talking about right now — how to bring more art-curious people into the fold. How to meet them where they are. How to make buying art feel possible rather than intimidating. Like, why is art buying so hard?

At some point we landed on a question that really got me thinking <<cue Carrie Bradshaw moment>>:

Why is spending money, say $5,000, on a couch easy and spending the same amount on a painting so hard?

Before you say it: I know not everyone spends $5,000 on a couch. The number isn’t the point. The psychology is.

Think about the couch for a second. You find one you like, or your interior designer tells you to buy it, and you buy it. You don’t lie awake wondering if it will hold its value. You don’t question whether you know enough about furniture to deserve an opinion. You don’t worry about whether you’ll still love it in five years or whether you’re being taken advantage of. Honestly, you might just buy it off the internet and never even sit on it before it lands in your living room.

It’s just a couch.

Now think about the painting.

Suddenly there are ALLLLL of these questions. Is it good? Will it appreciate? Do I know enough to have an opinion? What will people think? Is this artist worth following? Am I paying too much? What if I’m wrong? What if I love it now and hate it in five years?

The same money. Completely different psychological experience.

Here’s what I’ve been sitting with since that Zoom call.

The collectors who built the great collections — the ones who bought with confidence, who moved decisively, who seemed to know exactly what they were doing — didn’t feel that anxiety. Not because they were born with better taste. Not because they were smarter or more culturally fluent.

Because they had someone standing next to them.

An advisor. A dealer they trusted. A friend who knew the market. Someone who looked at the work and said: this one, not that one, here’s why, here’s what to offer, here’s the call. The advisor absorbed the anxiety. That’s what advisors do. They make a complicated purchase feel like buying a couch.

That service just wasn’t available to everyone.

There’s another layer worth naming here. Art advisory, as a real profession, only emerged in the 80s or 90s and and has become essential infrastructure since 2008. Before that, the art world was smaller. The gallery scene was more contained. Collectors weren’t navigating an infinite internet of artists, platforms, and price points. You walked into a handful of galleries in your city and bought what was in front of you.

Then the internet happened.

The supply of available art became incomprehensible practically overnight. Millions of works. Thousands of artists. Global access to everything at once. Democratizing in theory. Paralyzing in practice. More choice makes decisions harder. The art buyer in 1985 had a manageable number of options. Today, they have too many to count.

The advisory infrastructure never scaled to meet it. The art advisor model — high-touch, relationship-driven, commission-based — was built for the top of the market and stayed there. The people who need the most guidance in the most complex art market in history ended up with the least access to it because budgets didn’t match the model.

The people who need guidance are not hard to identify. They are the new collector who just inherited some money and wants to do something meaningful with it. The person who walks into a gallery and feels immediately out of their depth. The one who just wants a single great piece over the mantle but has no idea where or how to even begin looking. These are not unsophisticated people. They are people the market was never designed to serve. And to add insult to injury, MOST of these people do not live in places where they have easy access to the best art being created right now.

And the old gatekeeping filled the vacuum. The opacity that made a kind of sense when the art world was small became actively harmful when it went global. Private prices. Insider knowledge. The rooms you weren’t supposed to enter without an introduction. All of it persisted — and in some ways intensified — as the market expanded.

The art world created the anxiety and sold the antidote exclusively to people who could already afford it. And now we’re all on Zooms wondering why the next generation of collectors isn’t showing up.

The people who collected with confidence didn’t have less doubt. They just had someone to hand it to.

That was never supposed to be a luxury.

And so I return to my original question: why can’t buying a painting be as simple as buying a couch? Want my honest answer?

Because as humans, our creativity is what separates us from the animals. And because of that, I believe that everyone, even someone who claims to know nothing about art, has an inherent understanding of how great art in our daily lives will transform how we live in and occupy our most intimate settings. And we really don’t want to mess that up. A couch is just a couch. But a painting is not just a painting. It is a statement about what we love, what we value, and who we are.