Art Galleries Are Going After Millennial Buyers. What’s the Catch?

It was a screen print of Father Christmas, precariously gripping on to the North Pole and surrounded by melting ice caps, that first got 28-year-old Finbar Locke hooked on buying art. He picked up the print by artist Reuben Dangoor for £120 from the Royal Academy’s summer show in 2019.  

Since then Locke, who works on a Rolls Royce factory floor assembling cars, has added six more Dangoor prints to his collection, as well as a few by illustrator Mr Bingo and portrait artist Stephen Anthony Davids. Recently, he has upped the stakes – from buying works he likes for a few hundred quid to spending thousands. 

His latest purchase is a £9,000 print by New York street artist Richard Hambleton of four of the artist’s trademark exploding heads. He bought it from Yield Gallery in Soho, London along with a Di Faced Tenner by Banksy. “Those two pieces are investments,” Locke tells VICE. “Everything else is more for the love of the piece.”

As with other collectibles like Pokémon cards and rare trainers, young people are increasingly collecting and investing in art. A 2020 report from Art Basel found that people under 40 were the fastest growing age group of art buyers and noted that galleries had started trying to attract and keep the attention of millennials. 

For regular Joes – as opposed to super-rich collectors – limited editions and signed prints tend to be the most realistic way of buying art. These can be anything from a signed printed photo of a painting to a screen print or lithograph of a work. You are not going to be able to afford an original Picasso painting, obviously, but numbered prints and editions for famous artists start in the hundreds and go up from there. 

Galleries are increasingly using Instagram to advertise these as investment opportunities for young people. In sponsored posts and stories, they tout the potential for huge returns over short periods of time for famous artists’ works. 

A post from London’s S&P Gallery shows a £1,500 Picasso print that made a 246 percent return after selling for £5,200, while a Yield Gallery ad states that a work by artist Fern sold for 616% above its £1,500 estimate, for £10,750. Another from Maddox Gallery shows an £8,000 Banksy selling for over a hundred grand just a year and a half later – a return of 1,185 percent. 

Taken at face value, these ads make art investing look easy – just buy work from an artist you’ve heard of and hold on to it for a while – but tangible investments like art come with a load of risks you need to consider before starting your own mini Guggenheim collection.

When asked to verify the sale prices listed on their Instagram ads, S&P Gallery said they could not due to GDPR regulations. They sent links to similar prints listed elsewhere online, but these only show the asking price, not the sale price. Yield said that its advert does not claim the piece was initially bought or sold by the gallery. Rather, they say, it advertises an unrelated sale result through Tate Ward auctioneers, showing the estimate and sale price. Maddox Gallery said they are in the process of updating their content to adjust to the current market conditions associated and have recently removed the example above.

Writing on his blog in 2018, art finance expert Doug Woodham lays out why art is its own ballgame in terms of investing, explaining that art isn’t regulated like standard investments such as stocks. 

“These rules do not apply to the lightly regulated art market comprised of private art galleries, individual collectors, and artists,” he states. “In fact, it’s rather the opposite: knowledgeable insiders may trade their information to others in the hope of making a sale.”

While insider trading is illegal in the stock market, using your connections and access to get an edge in the art world is commonplace. This means that people in the know can use their art world connections and expertise to get an edge on the market and people without that kind of privileged access can be at a disadvantage. 

“You can definitely think you've got a good investment and follow the advice of galleries on Bond Street who will say ‘oh, this is going to be worth a lot’ – and then it turns out to be complete junk and it's never going to make you any money,” artist and Pure Evil gallery owner Charles Uzell-Edwards comments. 

Uzell-Edwards says before buying art as an investment, it’s important to find out whether there is a secondary – AKA resales – market for the artist. It’s incredibly easy to buy art if you have the money, but selling it on can be much more difficult. The secondary market shows whether people are actually reselling work and whether it’s going up in value when it sells. “It's completely speculative,” he says. “I mean, obviously, if it was that easy, you know, everyone would be doing it.” 

But Locke is pretty sure he’s on to a winner. Hambleton, a contemporary of Jean-Michel Basquiat, died in 2017. When artists die, their works become more scarce, which can – but not always – mean prices increase. Locke reckons that this, combined with continued interest in the 80s New York street art scene, means the £9,000 piece was a great opportunity. 

“It's terrifying in one way and sort of exhilarating in another,” he says. “I know there's a good return, that it will only go up and it has since gone up, and it just felt really right. I mean, it's a lot of money to part with, I understand, but I'm a risk taker.” 

In the same post, Woodham explains that another difference between art investing and traditional markets, is that it’s impossible to create an index to track prices like the ones that exist for housing or stocks. The only publicly available art prices are from auctions – and these tend to be for the most expensive pieces and those that are increasing in price. True investment returns and the value of works can be difficult to gauge. After all, art is only worth what people will pay for it. 

Because of this, the standard cliche for wannabe collectors is to “buy what you love” – the idea being that even if you overpaid, or the work becomes worthless, looking at it won’t give you a nosebleed. 

Matt Carter, a 34-year-old advertising creative, says his first rule when choosing art is: “Would I want this up on my wall?” He started his collection with a £180 Obey print and has also picked up various pieces from exhibitions he has seen over the years, including a wooden postcard of Banksy’s Peckham Rock, bought for £5 from the British Museum that now sells for close to £500. “I’ve got a spreadsheet with what I bought it for and what it's goes for on eBay and stuff like that,” he says. “It’s like Antiques Roadshow.”  

As he has begun to earn more in his job, he has started spending more on art. He now has some Banksy prints and a few originals by other artists. During lockdown, he splashed out £2,800 on a Damien Hirst edition from HENI, an art gallery in Soho, London. 

“When you're spending more money on something like Damien Hirst, you’re kind of hoping it's going to go up in value, it feels like an investment,” Carter says. “Whereas if something's a couple hundred quid, you're not gonna lose any sleep if you weren't able to sell it – I guess you can just enjoy it anyway.” 

Hannah Munby founded the Young Collectors community in 2021, based on the idea that art can be for everyone and to help dispel the misconception that you have to have an art history degree, lots of money or know the right people to start collecting. 

She says it makes sense to start small when buying art because it is so high risk and prices so unpredictable, pointing to the artistic work of former kids TV presenter Rolf Harris by way of example. People used to buy his art before Operation Yewtree came knocking in 2013 and he was convicted as a paedophile. “If you really invested in him when he was at the height of his career, you stand to lose a lot of money,” Munby says. 

It’s an extreme case study, of course, but you could also look to 20th century English painter Vernon Ward as another cautionary tale. His work was everywhere in the 1930s and 40s – so much so that reproductions became increasingly common. Now, however, his paintings are often found in house clearances and sold on Etsy for peanuts. 

Both Harris and Ward bear out the unpredictability of the art world. Artists and genres can quickly fall out of favour. Thirty years ago, street art was a counter-cultural movement. It’s now so mainstream my aunt has a Banksy Oyster card holder. Isn’t Carter worried it could all come crashing down? 

“I wouldn't say I'm worried – I think something like Banksy is blue chip,” he says. “But also, I really like it and it means a lot to me. I used to go up to London when I was like 15 to spot the little Banksy rat. To me, it's part of my life, so I wouldn't really care if it became worthless.”  

Financial expert Holly Mackay warns young people off investing in alternative investments, whether it’s art, vineyards, crypto or vintage cars. She looks to George Soros, one of the world’s most famous investors, who said that successful investing should be boring. “We instinctively like investing in more interesting things,” she explains, “but in my experience these end up losing most people money.” 

Locke knows that Sensible People think he should have put his money in a bank account to save towards a mortgage. He can see it in people’s faces when he tells them he spent close to £10,000 on a piece of art – even if, as he says, that’s fairly modest as art prices go. 

“I didn't want to put my money in the bank, I wanted to invest it,” he says. “I don't know about stocks or shares. I don't know about Bitcoin or anything like that. But I know a little bit about art and I'm pretty confident in this one.”