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Priceless: Lessons in Economics, Told Through My Art Collection
- Linda Du
- 4 hours ago
- 7 min read
Last week I was featured in the Art Journal's Next-Gen Collector series. Here's what my art collection taught me about value, choice, and what things are really worth.
I think about economics the way some people think about music: once you learn to hear it, it's everywhere. And the place I hear it most clearly is in my own home, on the walls, in the art I've collected over the years. Every piece, it turns out, is a lesson in an economic idea. When The Art Journal recently featured me in their Next-Gen Collectors series, I realised how much of my collecting is really applied economics. So here are the lessons, one idea and artwork at a time.
Value is subjective, not intrinsic
In 1776, Adam Smith pointed out that water, essential to life, costs almost nothing; while diamonds, which are useless in daily life, cost a fortune. The paradox of value: a thing's price and its usefulness often have little to do with each other. Economists eventually resolved it with the insight that value isn't baked into an object; it's assigned by people, based on what they need and want.
The most valuable thing I own proves it. During the Cultural Revolution, much of my family's history was erased. My father grew up believing his ancestors were teachers. When my grandmother passed away, he found a box of old land deeds revealing that our family had once been wealthy landowners, before handing over everything to the state. I had them restored and mounted by a paper conservator in Berlin, and their hand-painted calligraphy now covers a wall of my home. At auction, they'd be worth nothing. To me, they're priceless. The lesson generalises far beyond art: price is a market's opinion; worth is yours.
Utility is what we're really maximising
Which raises the question — if not price, what are we actually chasing? Economists call it utility: the satisfaction, the genuine well-being, a thing gives you. Money is only ever a means to it. This idea, at the heart of the marginal revolution of the 1870s, quietly rewired the whole discipline.
My first artwork taught me to feel the difference. It's Look at Us, by the South African artist Themba Khumalo, bought in Johannesburg where I met Themba and his friends on the social scene. I started buying art partly to support my artist friends, and partly to hold onto memories of my travelling twenties. The grit conveyed in that piece still transports me to that city. While I've built up my collection to include many more works, no purchase since has matched that first jolt of joy of being in a stable place where I could build my collection. This is what economists mean by diminishing marginal utility: each additional unit gives you less than the last. The broad lesson of diminishing margins: optimise for the number instead of the utility, and you'll keep buying and keep wondering why it stops making you happier.
Your choices reveal what you actually value
In 1938, Paul Samuelson gave us revealed preference: ignore what people say they value and watch what they actually do. Behaviour is the honest signal.
Look at my walls and you'll read me whether I like it or not. Two Ai Weiwei pieces, bought through Avant Arte — Guardian, and To Be Looked At, a sculpture of surveillance cameras — sit on the fault line between Western and Chinese values, between freedom and control. I feel a certain kinship with him: both of us come from China and ended up in Berlin at some point, which itself marks a tension between East and West in a reunited city. I never set out to make a statement about who I am by developing my own artistic practice. Revealed preference as a collector made it for me. The lesson applies to every budget and bank statement: your spending is a more honest autobiography than anything you'd say out loud.
We increasingly buy experiences, not objects
In 1998, the economists Pine and Gilmore argued that modern value is shifting from goods to experiences: we pay for how something makes us feel and where it takes us. Art is the purest example.
During COVID, stuck in my apartment in Dubai, I bought a pair of etchings of Rome from my friend Josh Bristow, an architect I'd studied alongside at Cambridge. Rome is a city he loves, and where I once spent a summer interning at the UN. Those etchings teleported me to another place and another chapter during a time when I couldn't travel at all. The broader point is that the experience a purchase delivers often matters more than the object itself. This underlines the experience economy of travel, concerts and retreats, in which the memory created during an experience provides the full value itself. This reshapes how businesses, and people, should think about what they're really selling and buying.
Every choice has an opportunity cost
The concept of opportunity cost is the value of what you give up to take your chosen decision. When I left a jobin consulting, I bought a single ink-and-watercolour painting by the Swedish artist Christine Ödlund — all renewal and springtime, serendipitous given I was starting a new life. The opportunity cost was stability, predictability and a well-trodden path. What I got instead was a marker of a turning point, on my wall forever, marking my entry into the unpredictable world of investment and entrepreneurship. The lesson: there is no such thing as a free choice. Every yes is a no to something else, which is exactly why knowing what you actually value matters so much.
There's wealth that never appears on a balance sheet
Pierre Bourdieu called it cultural capital: the relationships, knowledge and experiences that function like wealth even though no bank records them. One piece captures it — Heks, by Iulian Simion Belea, a lit sculpture of 3D-printed triangles. I met Iulian in Copenhagen, and he pulled me into the Burning Man community I've belonged to for a decade. Burning Man and its principles have shaped the way I view the world, community and how to live a full life. I first saw Heks at the Scandinavian regional burn, the Borderland. Buying it wasn't acquiring an object — it was ten years of belonging made physical. The lesson: the richest forms of capital are often the ones you can't liquidate, and a life optimised only for the financial kind is quietly under-diversified.
We overvalue what we already own
Behavioural economics gave us the endowment effect: once something is ours, we value it far above what we'd have paid for it. Usually it's a bias to guard against, but it also explains attachment.
I used to only buy from friends. Once it went the other way: at Art Basel Hong Kong I kept circling a painting that someone else had reserved, and when they dropped out, it was mine. Later I learned the artist, Gabriele Tethalova, is Czech and had painted it in Berlin — where I live. It had travelled from Berlin out into the world and back to my apartment, via Istanbul and Hong Kong. When Gabriele next visited Berlin from Prague, she came to see it over coffee. The story behind it and the connection I formed with the artist adds value to the painting for me personally. The lesson: ownership itself changes how we value things — useful to remember whether you're holding a stock, a house, or a painting.
Status is expensive; meaning compounds
In 1899, Thorstein Veblen described conspicuous consumption — buying to signal status, where a higher price is the whole point. Much of the art market still runs on it. But you don't have to play. My most treasured pieces are by friends: birthday gift paintings from Nora Kilonova, Nicolas Scalbert and Anjali Menon; a portrait by Ahmad Al Shareef blending my face with my tattoos and images of octopuses; drawings by Dima Melancholiac. None of it is a flex; all of it is meaning. The lesson generalises to almost every purchase: spending to impress is a race with no finish line, while spending on meaning pays a dividend every day.
Be honest about what's an investment — and what isn't
Here's the unglamorous truth: as a financial asset, art is unreliable. In 1986, the economist William Baumol studied three centuries of art sales and found the returns essentially unpredictable — "a floating crap game." So I don't pretend otherwise. I hold on to pieces by my friends for meaning, not returns. The lesson is one of the most valuable in personal finance: know which of your purchases are investments and which are consumption, and stop dressing one up as the other. That clarity prevents a lot of bad decisions.
Even economists know value isn't only rational
I'll end with the field's own patron saint of this idea. John Maynard Keynes - arguably the most influential economist of the twentieth century - was a serious art collector and the first chairman of Britain's Arts Council. Coincidentally I studied at the same college as Keynes (King's College at the University of Cambridge) as an undergraduate. Keynes gave us "animal spirits," the recognition that emotion, not just calculation, drives economic life. If the father of modern macroeconomics gave himself permission to value things beyond their return, the rest of us can too.
That's the thread running through every piece on my walls: economics, at its heart, isn't really about money. It's the study of how human beings decide what's worth it. Understanding that doesn't just make you a better collector or investor, it makes you clearer about every financial decision you'll ever make. And it's the same idea I build on in my work: helping people reimagine their relationship with money, and invest — in art, in experiences, in their own lives — in the things that are genuinely worth it.
Linda Du is the co-founder and CEO of Moola, an AI-powered financial planning platform on a mission to give everyone — not just the wealthy few — clarity and agency over their financial future. She was recently featured in The Art Journal's Next-Gen Collectors series.
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