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Comment by owenversteeg | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've always been curious about with art in this price range ($500-5000) is the resale value. Say your tastes change and you'd like to get rid of one of these after a few years, how painful is it to sell? What are your chances of getting 50% of the purchase price? 90%? 150%?

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I had taken a look at the affordable art market about a decade ago. What I found out was that “art as an investment” is either

1. About art normal people can’t afford

2. A full time speculation job

Unfortunately neither of those worked for me. I don’t know if things have changed in the last years, it seems that there are a couple more platforms around nowadays. I can go into detail about all that stuff but my personal takeaway was to completely ignore investment value in art until the price tags get close to seven figures. And yes, I still am a couple orders of magnitude away from that last price tag. I also don’t care, whatever art I own I am happy with and if I fall out of love with one piece I usually just gift it somewhere. On that last part, there are also usually some good opportunities to give art away for a good cause. Such auctions happen from time to time. I can imagine though that other people have had considerably different experiences with affordable art than mine :-)

Note: art in the above is meant to be paintings and sculptures, never bought anything else.

A rent the runway for art would be an amazing idea. It would require a large deposit to cover the initial art piece but provide customers with a dynamic art collection almost similar to how museums have visiting exhibits. I'd be happy to work with someone on this.

Decodova Museum loans art to its corporate members.

https://decordova.org/join-give/corporate-membership

They rotate the art through the year. Its DeCordova so the quality is highly variable, but its kind or decent. The artists don't get a lot out of it, membership and publicity...

https://decordova.org/join-give/corporate-art-loan

The Seattle Art Museum does this. There's an attached/affiliated gallery that sells art, and also provides rentals, as long as you're also a member of SAM. It's 10% of the price to rent for 3 months, renewable once, and if you decide to purchase, half the rental amount goes towards the purchase price. I used it quite a bit when I first began collecting art.

I read Liz Phair's book earlier this year, and Oberlin does (or perhaps did) do that for students, for something like 20 bucks a year in the 80s for UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS, crazy.

What would be neat for this kind of service is a way to sell the piece back, either to the artist or to the service. If they knew you bought it from the site they'd know it was authentic.

Is a Gazelle-style site for art a thing, that's not eBay? I don't know that you'd want to get rid of art you bought very often, but if you move and it doesn't fit with the new aesthetic, you might want to swap it for something more on point.

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