When I speak of accessible art, I'm not referring to appeal factor, but rather art that you can afford.  Sure, you can go to your county fair and find this type of art.  Not to generalize too much, but that's not typically my cup of tea.  You can certainly scout it out, as you can scout out your neighborhood art league.  One of the easiest ways to go about finding new and exciting art is to visit your local colleges and graduate schools.  Living in a major metropolitan area, I'm able to get to some, not a ton, of mfa shows and open studios.  This is typically a great way to see what up and coming artists are doing during their training, to forge relationships with them early, to show your support of their work, and to pick up some pieces for not a huge sum.  Of course many of the bigger programs, like Columbia and Yale are scouted from the get go and some galleries have mfa shows dedicated to mfa grad students.  You can also search for the various MFA programs on the internet and contact the artists directly.  I would email them, visit their studios, if possible, and see what they have available.  Some have already gone ahead and joined an established gallery, but many have not. Not everybody can be like the Vogels and get to 5-10 new art shows a week, but I don't think that's a necessity.  It's obviously helpful to see more of what is out there, but you can do a lot of the legwork via the internet, a medium that was not available to them during the peak of their art collecting.  Sure, it's not as accurate to judge a work from an internet picture, but you can  ask an artist to take additional pictures, including detailed, up-close shots and thereby gauge the piece with some accuracy.  If you can see a work in person then you can certainly gauge additional works from a particular artist that much more accurately.  I'm always interested in what artists somebody acquired or "discovered" early in their career and what attracted them at that time.