art for the modern home on a modest budget  

great
i am enjoying this discussion and the view points i have read. nice analogy between your coffee pot and print. the picasso i have is "the acrobat"

You Get What you Pay For
As an artist of course I'm going to say this. You get what you pay for and hopefully people see the value in buying art from their local artists or from any artist for that matter. But I think more people should be careful about what they term "cheap" art. Bargain art brings to mind different ideals, while "cheap" art may conjur up throw away work or work produced cheaply. It also depends on what your definition of art is as it applies to what you're willing to live with in your home. Many people see art as decoration meant to support their living environment in as subtle a way as trendy modern throw pillows. They both can be exchanged fairly readily. Then there are those who see art as something with more substance and they opt to own pieces that speak to them. Whatever your choice is, just make sure you get the quality that you pay for.

An empty wall.
An "emty wall" should not nesesarily be filled with art. It might be better not be filled at all...
Art posters like i.e. Vintage film posters designed by great graphic designers is a great alternative to bad art.But then again they are better layed on the floor/against the wall than "hang"
Also a wall hanging , that might not be a rare carpet or knit . Good silk screened fabrics i.e. marimekko is far better than crap art.
An empty wall is more elegant than a wall hang with crap art , crap photos , crap mirrors.You can keep your memories and souvenirs in your garage , your diary or in your head not your walls.

Yeah! Screw memories and fami...
Yeah! Screw memories and family members! They aren't as important as a pretty wall!
Ok enough with my sarcasm. I will say that there is a "right" way and a "wrong" way to display memories, but I will not agree that deleting them is the answer. Good design means solving problems ... not hiding problems under your bed.

xyz
This is an interesting topic, and has been explored quite at length on various "Art Blogs" (and also touched upon when Apartmenttherapy had a recent "best art in an apartment" competition). There's really so much to say.
To begin, though, we should all follow Koen's advice regardless of what we're collecting: Buy fewer but buy better. I too wish that I can trade my 25+ Nelson clocks for 3 or 4 really good and rare ones. But as anyone with the collecting bug knows, it's hard to follow this sound advice when one sees a "good deal".
And like Whitespike, I started off collecting vintage design, but now am much more into buying / collecting art. There's really too much to say about this, but the one thing I'll say here is that collecting good art with relatively limited funds is much, much more difficult than collecting good design. Given that budget concerns immediately eliminate any "name" artist (unless one is into posters or prints -- which I'm not; for many reason, though I dig mass produced vintage design, I like my art to be of the handmade, one of a kind variety), one will have to rely on one's eye & judgment to buy art. There's no "net" of "famous name" to catch the collector from falling into the abyss of buying awful stuff.
I mean that anyone can go and buy an Eames desk or a Nelson chair -- even a few hundred will get you a 'name' design. But 'name' art is much, much more expensive -- a few thousand dollars may get you a crappy Johns print, but no more. For someone on a relatively tight budget, but with the collecting disease all the same, finding good art is much more difficult. Plus, what you buy, given the subjectivity of aesthetic appreciation and the lack of any 'name' attached to it, will be much more easily mocked by others. It takes a much thicker skin, I've found.
I'll stop rambling. But my advice is a cliche: Train your eye -- look, look, and look again at every gallery, museum, book, website you can find -- and then go hunting at the flea markets and thrifts! I guarantee you'll find something you like ....

May I....
Two things that I would like to say over and beyond the interesting things that have been said. I agree with dcwilson that reproductions are of such quality now that there no reasons not to choose them if you like but can not affort the original. My only problem with it is that it is difficult to find reproductions at "real scale". I have no reproductions on the walls, but I buy them sometimes because the scale in books is often too small. But most often I have been shocked when a did see the real thing and the quality of the chosen scale. A painting that comes to mind is Picasso's son Paulo in the harlequin costume. I love the painting and I probably owned a reproduction at postersize at the time, but I was blown away when I saw the real thing which has such a wonderful size that I realized at that point how important the real size is to do justice the the work of art. Why is it that, now that reproduction is so sophisticated, we can not get the real sizes?
My second point is that a lot of well known bigh name artists are known because of the innovative role they played in the history of their art. On the other hands they might not always be the best painters of that period or school. Look around, attend openings of exhibitions, visit galeries and you will find living artists that might not have invented the wheel but paint very well within an already established "school".

Then there's always a self created conceptual work of art...
I think of Starcks entrance to Ian Schrager's Paramount Hotel with a grid of 40 or so vases all holding a single rose... I have a similar wall of two rows of twenty or so mid century model cars I assembled as a child... These are displayed in the diningroom of my MCM house... So there is a kind of relationship or kinship... As for my conceptual expression it presents "memorabilia" in a different way that in itself might be "art"... My point is... You don't necessarily have to go out and "invest" in a framed piece of artwork to express yourself and your interior artfully...

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I like what the guerilla girls have to say about the art world (or said, it might be dated now).
the art school thing sounds smart. find the artists before they take off and wealthy collector's inflate the value of their paintings or they fall off and become depressed and stop working forced to pick up jobs in construction / pornography - often times both.
How long have you been doing the triangles?
I was one of the firsts.
RAP doesn't seem to be to popular.
No Ghostface fans here???