Black Enterprise recently sat down with art lover & collector Swizz Beatz for a one-on-one. In the interview, Swizz Beatz breaks down the beauty of investing in Artwork and what mistakes amateurs should avoid:
As far as investing in art there’s a lot of different ways that you can go about it. You can invest in things you like…you can invest just for the value of the art, which I really don’t recommend because I’ve did that before and I ended up with a bunch of expensive paintings that I didn’t want to hang on my wall. Yeah, the value is there but you invested in something that you put in storage until it’s time to sell it. You can make the money but you could have done something else with that investment. At least, if you’re going to invest in art, invest in something that you love and take the risk.

Right now, I like to invest in new artists because that’s the future. Imagine if everybody knew [Jean-Michel] Basquiat was going to be Basquiat at that time or [Andy] Warhol…whatever..they didn’t know that. I just think that the couple generations before my generation they didn’t really know what was going on until the passing of the artist. We have so much politics in art from the sellers, the buyers it became like a hustle. Art never depreciates so its like “Wow, how can I put my money into something that doesn’t depreciate?” Art. So then art became a storage house for the super wealthy and then it became like a betting and trading game. People would bet and trade through art, so that wall that was once forty thousand is [worth] fifteen million. It’s a reason and able to justify the reason because one he’s not there anymore so he didn’t produce a lot of work like Piscasso and Monroe….these artists had hundreds and hundreds of work like Basquiat. I could go on and on about this because there’s so much but to make a longer story short, I suggest that people invest in art that they love and just be smart about the research. At the end of the day, even if the value doesn’t grow at least you have something on your wall everyday that you love to look at and inspires you.

I can dig it!!  I love art and all kinds of it.  I definitely would like to travel the world and collect different pieces.  One of my favorite artists is Salvador Dali.