Dear Greg, is it bad to buy art because it looks good on my wall?

Dear Greg,

I’ve started collecting – a few prints, a small painting – and I genuinely love how they look. But whenever I say that, people seem vaguely embarrassed for me. As if saying “it suits the room” is some kind of sin. Do I have to pretend it’s about politics or something meaningful?

There are two very different motives hiding inside your question. One is: “I bought this because I love how it looks as art.” The other is: “I bought this because I love how it goes with the sofa.” They might sound similar, but they’re not.

Let’s take the second one first. Choosing art purely because it matches the paintwork, fills an awkward wall, or calms down the scatter cushions isn’t wrong, but it’s not collecting. That’s interior decoration. You might buy a big monochrome canvas because the blue is the perfect blue, or a black-and-white photo of New York in the rain because it feels “arty” in the space, and that’s fine, but the room is the client, not you. The work is chosen to be the background, not to speak for itself.

Now the first one: loving how a work of art looks. It might still look great in the space, but that’s secondary. The choice was made because the work strikes a chord. It pulls you in before you’ve measured whether it clashes with the curtains.

The trouble is, somewhere in the last 50 years, “I just love how it looks” stopped sounding like a good enough reason. Post-’70s, beauty – if that’s what caught your attention – became suspect: politically toothless, old-fashioned, or, worse, bourgeois. Aesthetic pleasure was framed as distraction, something to apologise for. Art had to mean something, and by “mean,” people often meant it had to justify itself in conceptual terms.

Art critic Dave Hickey (whose book, The Invisible Dragon, is the OG text of radical beauty) reset the terms. For him, beauty wasn’t polite or ornamental – it was disruptive, erotic, democratic. He loved the idea that something could seduce you before you’d read a word about it. I once lent the book to a genteel elderly student, forgetting the transgressive beauty of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs inside: images of classical poise, made by an artist known for raw depictions of queer sexuality and death. Beauty here carried cultural static – a bouquet wired with politics.

Happily, the student was unfazed and understood the point. Her response echoed the 19th-century flaneur, Baudelaire’s, sense of beauty as “strange and familiar” – that uncanny double register. The things we keep looking at aren’t always soothing; sometimes they haunt. If it’s merely pretty, it fades into the wall. If it’s beautiful in that uncanny way, it stays alive.

And what about beauty that veers towards kitsch – the pretty for its own sake, the sentimental, the tacky souvenir we secretly love? Should we be embarrassed by that? This is where Susan Sontag, high priestess of cultural criticism, comes in. In her 1964 essay Notes on Camp, she showed how things dismissed as “bad taste” – sequins, melodrama, kitsch – could be sources of joy, even of meaning, when reframed as camp. Ever since, talk of taste has been shadowed by an anxiety: what are we allowed to love, and what does our love say about us?

Which brings us back to your friends’ embarrassed look. What they’re reacting to isn’t beauty – it’s what they think beauty signifies. For some, it reads as naïve, uncritical, decorative. They assume you haven’t thought beyond the surface. And maybe that’s a point worth taking: if you’re going to buy something for how it looks, make sure you’ve looked hard enough to see what else is there.

A good artwork never operates on one level. Some pieces hit you viscerally first, others lean on intellectual rigour – but the hook is still the hook. You don’t have to apologise for being caught by it.

What you might want to avoid is the fragility of liking only the surface. A purely decorative crush can fade – like a wallpaper pattern you suddenly realise is awful. If you love how it looks and also discover a deeper seam – some weirdness, tension, wit, history – that’s when a piece becomes something you can live with for decades.

So, is it bad to buy art because it looks good on your wall? No. Is it bad to buy it only because it looks good on your wall? Maybe – if you want to think of yourself as a collector rather than a decorator.

A painting can transform a room. But if the room is always the priority, the painting won’t stand a chance. Better to have a work that unsettles the colour scheme but keeps unsettling you. Or, as Hickey might put it: beauty isn’t a cushion. It’s a pin under the cushion.