Nepo Babies Are Taking Over the Art Market

The Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2026 finds Gen Z collectors have the highest average fine art spending. In 2025, it was $347,460, up 19 percent year on year and nearly three times the survey-wide average of $124,265.

The survey cautions that changes in sample size and regional makeup mean comparisons with earlier editions need context. But the gap within this year’s sample is striking.

Just 279 of the 3,100 respondents were Gen Z. Around 15 of them accounted for nearly half of the roughly 31 people who bought a work priced above $1 million in 2025 or the first half of 2026. Meanwhile, two-thirds of the cohort (68 percent) spent less than $50,000 on fine art in the first half of 2026. The average is pulled upwards by the 13 percent who spent more than $1 million in total during that period.

Family influence is visible in the numbers. Thirty-seven percent of Gen Z respondents said their wealth came mainly through inheritance or marriage, against 15 percent overall. Family was also the primary route into collecting for 40 percent, compared with 28 percent of the sample. Gen Z collectors are the most private, too: 39 percent restrict in-person viewing of their collection to their household and close circle, almost twice the share of any other generation.

Gen Z’s Spending Is Highly Concentrated

The nepo-baby effect on the art market is on the rise - but it's a close-knit thing. In this survey, Gen Z means respondents aged 20 to 29. All respondents had net worth above $1 million, excluding real estate and private-business assets, and have been active art buyers since 2024. 

‘Due to the very concentrated nature of high-end wealth, the bulk of value in inherited fortunes will flow directly to heirs who are already in the highest income and wealth brackets, potentially exacerbating inequality,’ the report notes. It warns that ‘if consumers in lower-, middle-, and upper-middle-wealth groups engage less, or fail to enter the market in the first place, the collector base could narrow, with spending becoming even more concentrated among the wealthiest buyers. 

This in turn increases the market’s dependence on its highest-value segment, which recent years have shown to be vulnerable to wider economic and financial risks and subject to limits on sustained growth.’ Less youthquake, more nepo-baby effect.

Gen Z collectors are also holding on to what they inherit, at least for now: almost 90 percent of those who inherited works still own them, against 64 percent of Gen X. The report notes that this may partly reflect the shorter time since Gen Z collectors received the works. We won’t see a flood of boomer art heading to Sotheby’s just yet.

The tendency to sell declines with wealth: around a third of heirs worth under $5 million kept none of their inherited works, against 11 percent of those worth more than $50 million. The survey links this to financial pressure, and points to earlier editions in which estate tax bills were among the main reasons heirs sold.

Ibrahim Mahama, 'The God of Small Things' (2026). Photo: Courtesy of Art Basel

Auction Sales Soar as Collectors Spend Less Through Them

The survey opens on the strong results posted by auction houses: in July, Christie’s reported $3.5 billion in first-half auction sales, up 71 percent year on year, and Sotheby’s $3.4 billion, up 59 percent, within record consolidated sales of $4.4 billion. Ninety pages later, its 3,100 collectors turn out to have put 10 percent of their art spending through auction, down from 12 percent last year and 23 percent in 2024. So what happened? 

The survey’s own answer is supply: much of the major auction houses’ growth ‘was driven by sales of high-end single-owner collections and top-tier works by established artists’. Most of its collectors never came near it: 77 percent spent under $50,000 on fine art in the first half of 2026.

Online Sales Fall; Online Spending Rises

The Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2026 puts online-only sales in 2025 at $9.2 billion, their lowest since 2019 and 15 percent of the market. The survey, by contrast, puts the share of collectors’ spending through online and social platforms at 27 percent, up from 22 percent last year and 17 percent in 2024. The two count different things. The Art Market Report covers dealers and auction houses only; the Survey also counts what collectors spend on NFT marketplaces, other online platforms and Instagram, where artists and dealers also sell.

Collectors Are Buying More Directly from Artists

Galleries still lead by number of buyers: 87 percent of collectors bought from a dealer – at a gallery in person, online, through social media or at a fair. Yet dealers and fairs together took 42 percent of what those collectors spent, against 60 percent in the 2024 survey. Artists selling directly took 19 percent of collector spending, and 69 percent of collectors bought straight from an artist at least once, more than double the 2024 share. One dealer, quoted anonymously in the Art Market Report 2026, puts it plainly: ‘Our biggest issue by far in 2025 is artists selling directly to customers who find the artist in our gallery.’

Collectors Are Playing It Safe

Collectors are also less adventurous, which is bad news for young artists and new formats such as digital art. Forty-five percent of collectors bought work by an artist they had discovered in the past year, down from 66 percent in the 2025 edition and the lowest share in five years. ‘Discovered’ here means new to that collector, not necessarily new or emerging in the market. Gen Z collectors were more open to unfamiliar artists: 56 percent bought work by one, compared with 36 percent of boomers.

Established artists, defined as those with a strong secondary market who regularly sell above $100,000, now account for 46 percent of the works these collectors own, against 45 percent last year and 25 percent in 2024.

Digital art lost ground. Its share of spending fell from 14 percent to 9 percent, and its share of artworks held from 13 percent to 10 percent, though the latter remains above the 3 percent reported in 2024. More than half of respondents (54 percent) had at least one digital artwork in their collection. The survey’s author, Clare McAndrew of Arts Economics, reads the shift as risk aversion: ‘a preference for artists with established reputations’, with collectors moving money ‘toward established mediums with longer price histories and proven resale demand’.

Transparency Tops Collectors’ Concerns

Collectors’ top concern this year is the trade’s transparency: opaque pricing, undisclosed fees and conflicts of interest, up from third place in 2025. For Gen Z, the top concern is the security of personal, financial and collection data online. Dealers’ second-biggest worry, according to the Art Market Report, is keeping the collectors they already have. Price-transparency tools may well start to come into their own. Collectors are also turning to apps and AI for advice: 22 percent use them, up from 20 percent last year and 4 percent in 2024.

Online publications and the press were the most-used digital advice source: 27 percent overall and 36 percent in Mainland China. In total, 58 percent used digital resources, while 32 percent turned to Instagram or X (Instagram alone, 19 percent, up 2 percentage points).

Art Basel Paris 2025. Photo: Courtesy of Art Basel.

Art Market Growth Lags Behind Wealth

The wider picture is that art isn’t keeping up with the wealth around it. Millionaires’ combined wealth rose 11 percent in 2025, according to UBS, and billionaires’ wealth rose 25 percent, according to Forbes. The art market grew 4 percent in 2025, to $59.6 billion, and remains 7 percent smaller than in 2015, according to the Art Market Report. These figures measure different things, but the gap is striking. Collectors now hold 15 percent of their wealth in art, down from 20 percent last year, partly because their financial assets grew faster. UBS also finds that family offices have halved art’s share of their alternative assets, from 2 percent to 1 percent.

What’s left is a market in three tiers. Evening auctions are filled by estate sales of trophy works; artists sell directly and on Instagram at the bottom, while the galleries in between carry rising costs, with dealers’ art fair costs up 9 percent and overall operating costs up 5 percent in 2025.

Art is also doing a different job for those who own it. One in five collectors has borrowed against their art, rising to 45 percent in the US. Among borrowers, 53 percent used the funds to acquire more art and 50 percent to cover collecting costs such as taxes and storage. Meanwhile, Bank of America’s 2026 Study of Wealthy Americans finds that, among US respondents interested in building a significant art collection, the share citing asset appreciation as a primary motive fell from 50 percent in 2024 to 36 percent.

Collectors are spending more, with average fine art spending up 13 percent to $124,265, and less of it reaches the galleries that carry the middle market. Whether the spending shift marks a broader change in the market, next year’s edition will have to show.