What the Art Market Still Gets Wrong About Next-Gen Collectors

A version of this article originally appeared in The Back Room, our lively recap funneling only the week’s must-know art industry intel into a nimble read you’ll actually enjoy. Artnet News Pro members get exclusive access—subscribe now to receive the newsletter in your inbox every Friday.

The art trade is facing an existential crisis if it does not attract new, younger buyers.

That’s the takeaway of art market aficionado Georgina Adam’s latest book, NextGen Collectors and the Art Market, just published by Lund Humphries. In it she tackles the industry’s most persistent anxiety: how to get millennials and “zoomers” (Gen Z members) interested at a moment when tastes, technologies, and expectations are shifting faster than the trade can keep up.

There are signs of progress, on paper at least. Christie’s said a third of its buyers in the first half of 2025 were under 45. But as its former CEO Guillaume Cerutti told Adam, these collectors are also more “volatile”—less predictable, less loyal, and harder to track. They may be participating in the market, but they aren’t playing by its rules.

Who Are They?

Defining “next gen” in and of itself has proved tricky. Adam—a self-disclosed boomer—notes that there is a lack of clarity around the term within the trade. For some, it’s buyers under 35 or 40 (i.e. millennials). Others claim 50 (Gen X) is a better benchmark, given that the average age of existing collectors is around 65. One advisor said age has nothing to do with it, and that the term can encompass anyone new to the collecting arena.

Skarstedt, Frieze Masters 2025. Photo: Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy of Frieze.

Adam rightly underscores the importance of non-Western markets in these calculations, especially in Asia, since these regions often boast younger populations than in Europe and the U.S. She points to the spike in ultra-contemporary art prices between 2019 and 2022 as evidence, noting that the trend was “notably driven by young Asian collectors, and their withdrawal from this market, along with the fall in the Chinese economy, triggered the slump” in the category, which persists.

What Do They Want?

That’s the trillion-dollar question, given the much-touted Great Wealth Transfer currently underway, and it’s the query around which two core chapters of the book circle. Though the economic conditions have not been as favorable for younger generations as they were for boomers, there are still plenty of (often tech-enriched) next-gen buyers, but the art market “seems to have struggled to capture their attention,” Adam writes.

James Rosenquist, F-111 (south) (west) (north) (east) (G. 73), 1974. Courtesy of Phillips.

This may be largely down to shifting tastes. Adam rattles through the stereotypes about younger collectors: that they’re Instagram-led, identity– and social issues–based buyers who favor experiences over objects. There are paragraphs aplenty about luxury sales as a “gateway” for new buyers at auction, but there’s little evidence that they stick around to bid on blue-chip art. She cites Artnet Price Database stats on the falling sales totals for former auction darlings like James Rosenquist and Robert Rauschenberg, writing, “This is likely to upend the values of the art market, based as they are on a canon of established, validated artists, some of whom are beginning to look old-fashioned.”

When Do They Want It?

There’s nothing incorrect about Adam’s assessment of shifting tastes and trends, but for me, a millennial, these tropes never really get to the heart of the art trade’s inability to entice younger clientele. When they want things, they want things now. Immediacy and transparency—or the lack thereof—are the real problems facing this 20th-century industry, as the 21st century speeds along.

Adam gets at this in the book’s penultimate chapter, “How NextGens Collect,” noting that young collectors “have minimal loyalty to institutions, which they see as having outdated values and principles.” Importantly, she adds that price opacity is a “particular bugbear” of many young buyers. “They suspect, often rightly,” she writes, “that dealers manipulate the market by not disclosing inventory and previous sales, as well as deciding who gets a discount, and how much.”

The 2016 Young Collectors Party at the Guggenheim Museum. Photo: Patrick McMullan/ Sean Zanni.

The Bottom Line

Still, Adam makes only cursory attempts to look at this status quo’s “disruptors”—cheugy as that term may now be, thanks to its overuse by millennial tech bros. I would have loved more space dedicated to thoughtful analysis of digitally native platforms that have attempted to provide immediacy and transparency in the art market (like Artnet)—and their pitfalls. At the very least, a few examples of next-gen conversion success stories in parallel industries would have provided context for how change can happen, not just why it’s now stalled. The last thing I want to read about is Christie’s self-reported stats on new buyers at its auctions, and if I feel that way, as someone who works in this field, I can guarantee any potential buyers my age are even less interested in the 260-year-old auction house.