Prints Aren’t the “Entry Point” - They’re the Most Sophisticated Market We Have
© MyArtBroker
Market Reports
Prints are often described as a starting point for new collectors: accessible, reassuring, and somehow preparatory. That framing is well-intentioned, but it fundamentally misunderstands how the secondary prints market actually functions.
The Secondary Prints Market and Transparency in Art Pricing
I’ve heard the phrase “prints are a great entry point” approximately fourteen times in 2026 already. It’s always said generously. Reassuringly. Often with a small nod, as if we’re talking about training wheels. And every time, it makes me want to gently – and then not so gently – push back.
The secondary prints market is the most transparent, data-rich, behaviourally revealing segment of the art market we have. Which is precisely why it makes some people uncomfortable.
Editions trade often. They trade publicly. They trade across cycles, geographies, and moods. They leave fingerprints everywhere. You can see what happens when demand rises, when supply loosens, when estimates overshoot, when confidence evaporates, and when it comes roaring back.
In other words, prints don’t let the market hide. That’s complexity, not simplicity.
Demand Curves, Price Elasticity, and Collector Behaviour
Because when you can observe price elasticity in real time - how buyers react to small shifts, how certain images hold while others wobble - you learn very quickly what people actually value versus what they politely claim to admire. You get demand curves, not dinner-party opinions.
You get demand curves, not dinner-party opinions. This is why the idea that prints are somehow “less sophisticated” than unique works never survives contact with reality in my opinion.
Liquidity in the Wider Art Market
Liquidity, for example, is often spoken about in the art world like a slightly embarrassing relative. Useful, but best not discussed in public. In most asset classes, liquidity is understood as a sign of market health. In art, it’s sometimes treated as if it undermines gravitas.
Which is odd, when you think about it. Liquidity doesn’t make art shallow, it just demonstrates a market's edge.
If a work can trade repeatedly, not just once, to one buyer, under opaque conditions, it has to earn its price again and again. That’s not dilution. That’s pressure. And pressure is very clarifying, as we all know.
Print Collecting: How Collectors Actually Mature
One of my favourite myths is that collectors “graduate” from prints into unique works, as if editions are a sort of polite foyer you pass through on the way to the serious rooms. In practice, the opposite is often true. I do think collectors graduate from primary to secondary markets, almost like they had to take a punt to earn the right to get into what I consider the real market. I am sure that rightly ruffles some feathers too.
Whilst we work with many new 'emerging' collectors, many of the most experienced collectors we work with arrive at prints later, not earlier. They come armed with taste, context, and a healthy scepticism for hype (often from experience in the primary market). They like prints because they allow comparison. Because they reward attention. Because you can understand an artist’s imagery across time, not just freeze-frame it in a single object.
Data and Market Literacy
Prints let collectors really think. They also force a more honest relationship with data - which, again, is part of the problem for some corners of the industry. Auction histories, edition sizes, resale patterns, price ranges: none of this tells you what to buy. But it does tell you what story you’re choosing to believe. And that’s just, at base level, useful information.
‘Good’ collectors aren’t looking for certainty. If knowing the future were possible, we’d all be out of a job. What they want is informed conviction, the confidence to say, “I understand the risks, the context, and the alternatives, and I still want this.” Prints are exceptionally good at facilitating that moment.
They make the market explain itself. They expose the difference between narrative and behaviour. They make it harder to bluff. And they reward people who pay attention.
This might also explain why the prints market has been quietly resilient while other areas have wobbled in 2025. Not immune, nothing is, but steadier. Certain series continue to trade not because they’re fashionable, but because buyers understand where value has sat, where it’s tested, and why it holds.
Rethinking Prints as the Deep End of the Art Market
So if there’s a reframing to be done, it’s this: prints aren’t the bottom rung of the ladder. They’re the clearest lens we have on how art markets actually function.
They show us how demand forms, how value behaves, and how collectors think when the noise drops away. They reward literacy, patience, and pattern recognition. And they punish laziness, in analysis, in explanation, and in assumption.
Which is why they’re not an entry point at all.
They’re the deep end.