NextGen Collectors and the Art Market

An incisive survey from bestselling art-market commentator Georgina Adam of the changing landscape of art collecting as a younger generation of collectors disrupts the status quo. Drawing on new interviews with collectors and art-market specialists internationally, Adam examines how changes in collecting trends are being driven by generational shifts in the sources of wealth, as well as the changing tastes, different motivations and new modes of acquiring art of Millennial and Gen Z collectors compared to older generations. What does all this mean for the future of art collecting and of the art market?

This is the first book to focus on the tastes and buying patterns of a new group of dynamic and Influential collectors, most of them still under 50, who are shaping the art market today. This group is younger than previous generations of collectors, with much of their wealth being self-made. Many of them will also benefit in the coming decades from the Great Wealth Transfer, which could see in the region of $72 trillion pass to Gen Z and Millennials. Their art purchases may well be conducted online, via channels which cut out the traditional art-market institutions. They are also more likely than previous generations to be based outside the traditional art centres of the US and EU, with China and the Middle East both seeing a growth in young collectors. These trends are likely to have a profound impact on the ways in which art is bought and sold, as Georgina Adam describes with clarity and insight.

Georgina Adam is a journalist and author who has covered the global art market for over 30 years. She is a contributor to the Financial Times and The Art Newspaper, where she was Art Market Editor from 2000 to 2008 and is now Editor at Large. She is the author of Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century (Lund Humphries 2014), Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of the Art Market in the 21st Century (Lund Humphries 2018) and The Rise and Rise of the Private Art Museum (Lund Humphries 2021).