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

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Georgina Adam’s New Book Argues the Art Market’s Next-Gen Challenge Is Transparency, Not Taste

The art market has spent years asking how to“get” younger collectors. In her newly published book“NextGen Collectors and the Art Market” (Lund Humphries), veteran art-market journalist Georgina Adam suggests the more revealing question is why the trade still expects new buyers to accept old rules - especially around speed, access, and pricing.

Adam frames the issue as a persistent industry anxiety: attracting millennials and Gen Z at a moment when technology, cultural priorities, and buying habits are evolving faster than the market’s traditional structures. The book arrives as auction houses continue to tout demographic gains. Christie’s, for instance, reported that one-third of its buyers in the first half of 2025 were under 45.

But Adam is careful about what those numbers can and cannot prove. Even defining“next gen” remains unsettled inside the trade. Some professionals use the term for buyers under 35 or 40, essentially millennials and younger. Others argue that 50 is a more realistic threshold, given that the average age of established collectors is often cited at around 65. One advisor Adam cites goes further, suggesting age is beside the point:“next gen” can simply mean anyone newly entering the collecting arena.

Where Adam’s analysis becomes most pointed is in her insistence that the next generation cannot be understood through a purely Western lens. She emphasizes the importance of non-Western markets - particularly in Asia - where demographics skew younger than in Europe and the U.S. That shift, she argues, has already left fingerprints on pricing.

Adam points to the spike in ultra-contemporary art prices between 2019 and 2022 as a case study. The surge, she writes, was“notably driven by young Asian collectors.” Their subsequent withdrawal from the category, combined with the broader slowdown in the Chinese economy, helped precipitate a slump that has continued to weigh on ultra-contemporary demand.

The book also tracks how changing preferences can ripple through the canon that underpins blue-chip confidence. Drawing on Artnet Price Database data, Adam notes falling sales totals for artists who were once reliable auction favorites, including American painter James Rosenquist (1933–2017) and American artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008). The implication is not simply that tastes change, but that the market’s value system - built on a roster of established, validated names - may be entering a period of recalibration as some artists begin to read as less urgent to younger buyers.

Adam does not reduce younger collectors to a single profile, though she acknowledges the stereotypes that circulate in the trade: that they are Instagram-led, motivated by identity and social issues, and more interested in experiences than objects. She also notes the role of luxury categories as a“gateway” at auction, even as the question remains whether those buyers reliably graduate to bidding on blue-chip art.

Her most consequential argument arrives in the book’s penultimate chapter, titled“How NextGens Collect.” There, Adam writes that many young collectors have“minimal loyalty to institutions,” which they may view as operating with outdated values and principles. Just as importantly, she identifies price opacity as a recurring point of friction. Younger buyers, she suggests, often suspect -“often rightly,” in her words - that dealers can manipulate the market by withholding information about inventory and prior sales, and by selectively deciding who receives a discount and how large it will be.

Taken together, Adam’s portrait suggests that the next generation’s demands are less about novelty than about clarity: faster access to information, more legible pricing, and a market culture that feels accountable rather than clubby. If the art trade wants to convert demographic curiosity into sustained collecting, the book implies, it may need to modernize not only what it sells, but how it communicates value.

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