PUT YOUR MONEY ON THE WALL

Investing in art isn't just for the elite. We show you how to start your own stellar collection, one masterpiece at a time.

- KEITH BARNES

We've all seen the headlines: Some artwork by Van Gogh fetches millions of dollars. A work by Irma Stern raises record-breaking amounts at an auction. And then, after digging around a bit, you learn that some unknown painter put one shade of white paint over another shade of white and became an overnight sensation, selling their modernist 'masterpiece' for the price of a small country.

What is going on, you wonder, because while an artwork in a museum can often make sense, there's plenty of pieces being bought and sold that sound utterly impossible to decode. And, freakishly, the owners of these creations are making a mint sometimes before anyone's even heard of the artist.

The art world can feel impenetrable, might strike you as pretentious, but it needn't be. For help figuring out where to start, we turned to Denzo Nyathi, a curatorial associate with Latitudes (latitudes.online), an online platform designed to make selling and collecting art more democratic - and a whole lot simpler as well as or that it's a great investment. Gallerists are paid to sell artworks, but no amount of cajoling will convince your gut instincts to change.

Collecting is also the way by which you will gain knowledge. The more you you will need to live with your purchases, that they will hang on your walls or be displayed in your home, get seen by your friends and visitors, and you will look at them every single day. Start with art that makes you happy in some way, or that makes you think and wonder. It's said that great art has a way of causing us to return again and again as we are attracted not only to its aesthetic beauty, but also to some underlying enigma. In other words, if you don't fully understand what you're seeing, that might be a good thing.