Stereotypes about Gen Z collectors are being challenged by this year’s Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting, which finds that the youngest generation in its high-net-worth sample is spending more on art than any other age group and showing high levels of engagement with the art world.
However, the findings come with an important qualification: this is a small group of exceptionally wealthy young people, many with ties to family wealth, whose behaviour is not necessarily representative of buying across all Gen Z consumers. Even so, their spending patterns could shed important light on the future of the art market, in terms of both the youngest and wealthiest collectors.
The survey, produced by Arts Economics and authored by its founder Clare McAndrew, polled 3,100 high-net-worth individuals, each with at least $1m in personal net wealth excluding real estate and assets in privately held businesses. Gen Z, defined in the survey as those aged 20 to 29, accounted for just 9% of respondents.
But those 279 respondents were particularly active. In 2025 and the first half of 2026, those Gen Z collectors reported the highest average expenditure on fine art by a considerable margin. In 2025, they spent an average of $347,460 on art, up 19% from the previous year and more than twice the average expenditure of any older generation surveyed, according to the report. Across the full sample, average fine-art spending was $124,265 in 2025, up 13% from 2024. Average Gen Z expenditure in the first half of 2026 alone exceeded their full-year 2025 average. The findings run counter to an oft-repeated worry within the trade: that members of Gen Z are less interested in collecting art.
“It’s always interesting when you have a notion or an idea going in, and it just gets completely disproved,” McAndrew tells The Art Newspaper.
The number of works purchased by survey respondents was broadly similar across generations, suggesting that Gen Z’s higher spending was driven primarily by buying higher-priced works. According to the report, just 1% of collectors surveyed bought a work priced above $1m in 2025 and the first half of 2026, and Gen Z accounted for nearly half of those buyers. Of the Gen Z collectors, 13% reported spending more than $1m on fine art in the first half of 2026, compared with 3% of respondents overall.
“So many people are saying that younger collectors are not so engaged or not really interested, and they’re not focusing on art, or they’re just buying a load of other stuff,” McAndrew says. “Whereas this survey showed very much a different picture, that they were among the most engaged of all the different age brackets, and the spending levels were pretty amazing.”
It’s important to note these young collectors being surveyed are far from the average twenty-something attendee at a Thursday night gallery opening. Family wealth and influence appear to play a particularly important role in their collecting journey. While 15% of respondents overall said their wealth came primarily from family-related sources, the figure rose to 37% among Gen Z, while 40% of Gen Z collectors also said family influence encouraged them to collect, compared with 28% of respondents overall. It’s hard to say if Gen Z collectors from more humble beginnings display the same behaviours now, or if they will as their spending power grows over the years.
That distinction is important as wealth moves between generations in the so-called Great Wealth Transfer. The report cites UBS estimates that more than $83 trillion will be transferred globally over the next 20 to 25 years, with almost 90% of that sum passing on to younger generations. Millennials and Gen X will be the most immediate recipients, but Gen Z is also expected to receive significant wealth over time.
Wealthy collectors are also becoming an increasingly important part of the art market as inequality grows. Millionaires represent just 1.5% of the global adult population in 2025 but control 48% of global wealth, up from 44% in 2019 and less than 40% in 2010, according to the report.
Boomers and Zoomers on the scene
The Gen Z collectors who responded to the survey are not disengaged from in-person art-world activities. Boomers attended the most art-related events, followed by Gen Z, while millennials attended the fewest. Women and Gen Z collectors surveyed both attended close to an event a week in 2025 and 2026, according to the report.
Aida Valdez, the founder of Mad54, a platform that stages exhibitions, encourages new collectors and supports emerging artists—particularly those of Latin American descent—says she has observed that kind of high engagement among Gen Z collectors.
“They’re really interested in community-building, and they’re also interested in converting their peers” to art collecting, Valdez says. “Gen Z collectors are a lot more engaged with the community aspect of art collecting.”
The survey also points to a broader change in appetite for risk. After the share of collectors reporting buying work by an unfamiliar artist reached a five-year high of 66% in 2025, it fell to 45% in 2026, the lowest level in five years. Arts Economics interprets the decline as a sign of greater risk aversion and a shift towards established artists and familiar names. Gen Z, however, remained more open to discovery. More than half (56%) of Gen Z collectors bought an unfamiliar artist’s work in the survey’s time frame, compared with 36% of Boomers.
At the same time, collectors are increasingly finding ways to buy outside the market’s traditional structures. In this year’s survey, 69% of collectors said they bought directly from artists, up 6% from the previous survey and more than double the level recorded in 2024. Nearly half (48%) bought from artists’ studios, 40% commissioned works and 38% purchased work through Instagram. Artist-direct sales accounted for 19% of collectors’ total expenditures, according to the report.
Nevertheless, galleries remain the dominant route into the market, with 87% of collectors reporting they bought from a dealer during the survey period, including 75% directly and 62% through an art fair. Notably, two-thirds of collectors who preferred dealers chose to interact remotely through websites, phone, email or Instagram rather than at the gallery’s brick-and-mortar space. That is an important figure for dealers to keep in mind, McAndrew says.
“We kind of shy away a little bit from that softer qualitative data about preferences and motivations and things like that,” she says, “but some of them are among the most important."
