Talking about her buying strategy, Dorothy Vogel recounted: "We had no restrictions on what we bought. We just bought what we liked." Laura Paulson, deputy chairman for the Americas at Christie's auction house suggests that this cuts to the heart of the Vogels' success. "They were divorced from any sense of monetary value," she argues. "They wanted to connect, to be part of something."
In this regard, the Vogels' art purchases seem very different from the quick buy-and-sell strategy of most stock pickers. "Not every stock you buy will be a great pick," Paulson notes. For the Vogels, the key consideration wasn't the short-term cost of their art but the value that it added to their lives -- a value that bore considerable long-term fruit.