In both life and art collecting there is no substitute for having a levelheaded friend who knows you well and is truthful enough to tell you when you're going to buy junk. We are lucky enough to have our friend Aaron, a fellow art management major I met in undergrad in art history classes. We have a mutual love a fine art and unquestionably defined taste. Like us, his taste in artwork has matured and changed, he's no longer the strict modernist and abstract loving 20 year old. We were actually polar opposites in our artwork taste for years, we could meet in the middle at the Renaissance but there was not much overlap for more contemporary artwork tastes. Overtime he moved towards appreciating the baroque and I have begun to like more modernism. We realized that good art is when two very different people in taste and preferences are looking at the same work and can both admit that it's good.
It just hits when it's right.