The art market is nearing a critical inflection point, according to a new 2024 survey of global collecting from Art Basel and UBS.
Rich people are getting richer, but art represents a lower percentage of their net worth than in years past; meanwhile, a core group of dedicated collectors report that they plan to attend fewer art-related events than before, even though they favor in-person acquisitions by a large margin.
On top of this, a slow-moving tsunami of wealth is transferring art from the hands of an older generation into a younger one, even as the youngest generation of collectors appears to be pulling back from the market.
Taken together, the report paints the picture of a collecting class in flux, whose changing behavior and taste could have serious implications for a market still in recovery.
"When you look back over the last 10, 20 years, the market has roughly hovered in sales value around that $60 billion to $65 billion price point," says Noah Horowitz, chief executive officer of Art Basel.
"But what's being sold in the composition of that has changed pretty meaningfully," Horowitz explains. "And so I think the question for the future is: Is there a path to further growth in a world where these other dynamics are playing out and changing?"
The Good News
The findings are based on two surveys conducted this summer—one of 3,663 respondents who were active in the market from 2022 to 2024, and the second of more than 1,400 private collectors sampled from Art Basel's VIP list.
The good news is that people still want to buy art, though what art they're buying is changing.
For instance, more than half of respondents had bought works on paper in 2023, a category that tends to be cheaper than painting — a sharp jump from the year prior, when just 33% had bought art in that category.
Similarly, more than half of high net worth respondents' expenditure in 2023 and 2024 was on new and emerging artists, who are likely to be cheaper than their more established peers; that's up from 44% in a previous survey.
Women artists are major beneficiaries of this shift. The share of works by females in high net worth respondents' collections rose to 44%, its highest level in seven years.
Spending on female artists' work also rose—respondents who spent the most on art (more than $10 million so far in 2024) dedicated the largest share (52%) to works by women.
"Funnily enough, around 44% of sales were female artists, and around 45% of UBS clients are women, a number which has increased by about 5 percentage points over the last few years," says Paul Donovan, chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management.
"So there's an interesting potential dynamic there, because it is certainly very possible that within 20 years women will own a majority of global wealth," Donovan adds.
The Mixed News
In 2022, high net worth individuals allocated 24% of their wealth to art. That number has fallen to just 15% in 2024.
This isn't necessarily because valuations have plummeted or collectors have sold off their holdings, Donovan explains, but rather because art potentially hasn't kept pace with the rest of collectors' growing portfolios.
