Most people who visit the Mona Lisa will spend less than 15 seconds looking at it. The reason for their visit is because it is a famous painting by a famous person hanging in a famous museum. This is true of most other art as well.

Take a little longer to look at the painting and you will notice that the top half of the face is painted while she is smiling and the bottom half while expressionless. At first glance it looks like a normal expressionless pose. Yet when your gaze meets her eyes, your brain picks up the micro-expressions, small muscle flexes around the eye, and thinks she is smiling. Giving the painting a haunting presence, as though she is giving you a secret smile. This is the mark of good art, it creates an emotional response.

Of course, emotions are not rational and people will disagree about what is good and bad art. When a person has to commercialise art, they need to rationalise their investment decisions. So art collectors and auction houses become fixated hyping an artists ‘brand name’ and proving a paintings provenance. The end result is any painting by a famous artist will be worth hundreds of times more than an anonymous artist.

Essentially art becomes a status symbol, subject to fads and celebrity cult. If you are out of the industry, you will only hear about an artist once they are near the top of their fame bubble. So if you buy art like this, you are likely to lose money.

I encourage you to spend less time looking at the label and more time looking at the painting. Buying items that give you an emotional connection. Although it won’t make you rich it will give you pleasure. And it will likely retain it resale value, because someone else is likely to have the same reaction to the painting.