The Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025 reads like a snapshot of an art world at a hinge moment—between generations, values, and the physical and digital spheres that define culture today. Conducted across ten markets with 3,100 high-net-worth collectors, the report offers quantitative proof of something the art world has sensed for years: the future of collecting no longer belongs to a small fraternity of boomer patrons. Instead, as this year’s report indicates, it’s increasingly shaped by women and by the first generation to grow up online.
A New Class of Collectors
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Nearly three-quarters of the survey’s respondents are Gen Z or Millennials, a demographic shift that’s redefining how taste, access, and value are negotiated in real time. These younger collectors are more global, more digital, and more comfortable collapsing the boundaries between art, design, fashion, and technology. For them, collecting isn’t merely ownership—it’s participation.
And the numbers prove it. Gen Z collectors now allocate an average 26 percent of their wealth to art, the highest share of any age group. Their portfolios stretch beyond paintings to include digital works, limited-edition design, even sneakers and sports assets. The report’s foreword notes that art “increasingly sits alongside design, luxury goods, and lifestyle collectibles,” blurring the old hierarchies between aesthetic judgment and personal branding.
The Feminization of the Market
At the same time, the most profound wealth story of the decade—the Great Wealth Transfer—is underway. UBS estimates more than $83 trillion will pass between generations over the next few decades, with women expected to control a serious share of the pie. By the end of 2024, women already controlled more than a third of global wealth, a share projected to rise sharply in the future.
You can see that growing power in their collecting patterns. Across 2024 and the first half of 2025, female collectors outspent men by 46 percent, closing the historical gap in both activity and influence.
The contents of their collections mirror that growing parity: works by women now account for 49 percent of holdings among female collectors, compared with 40 percent among men.
The symbolic and material consequences are massive. For decades, institutional parity was a philanthropic goal; now, gender balance is being driven by market forces. Women are not just buying differently—they’re building a different canon.
Digital Art Goes Mainstream (Again)
One of the report’s more striking discoveries is how quickly digital art has (re)entered the mainstream. Fifty-one percent of high-net-worth collectors purchased a digital artwork in 2024–25, nearly tying sculpture for third-largest medium by value. (Sixty-seven percent of participants said they purchased a painting, and 56 percent a sculpture.)
Digital purchases are no longer the novelty of crypto’s tacky 2021 bubble. Instead, they represent an increasing coziness with the way art is made, bought, traded, and displayed. The report describes a “growing comfort with fluid, hybrid modes of exchange,” a sentiment that now extends from online viewing rooms to direct messages between artists and buyers.
The Rise of the Direct Relationship
That fluidity shows up in how art changes hands. In 2024–25, 63 percent of collectors purchased directly from artists, up from 27 percent two years earlier and 43 percent from 2022.
Nearly half of all high-net-worth buyers used social media to do it: 43 percent bought from studios, 37 percent commissioned works, and 35 percent purchased via Instagram links.
The old hierarchy—dealer first, artist second—is slipping. Sure, galleries remain the most trusted channel overall, but the survey finds that collectors’s second-most-preferred route is now direct purchase, a category that’s more than doubled in just one year.
Rethinking Risk
Conventional wisdom says women are more risk-averse investors. In art, that’s proving to be wildly untrue. The survey shows 55 percent of women frequently buy works by unknown artists, compared with 44 percent of men, despite both groups rating such purchases as high-risk. In other words, they recognize the risk and do it anyway.
The data suggests a cultural confidence—one that treats discovery as both social capital and artistic responsibility. The market’s appetite for “emerging” may have chilled but, for women collectors, risk is a form of authorship.
From Frenzy to Stability
After years of froth, 2025 looks surprisingly calm. Selling intentions have fallen by more than half since 2024, dropping from 55 percent of collectors to 25 percent, while 84 percent remain optimistic about the market’s direction and only four percent pessimistic.
That optimism is rooted in a shift from speculation to stewardship: more collectors plan to donate works to museums or pass them to family than to sell them.
Collecting as Identity
Threaded through the report is a subtle, but seismic change in motivation. Collecting has become less about possession than about projection—of values, affiliations, and personal narratives. As the Art Basel foreword puts it, today’s collectors pursue “a widening definition of connoisseurship, where art increasingly sits alongside design, luxury goods, and lifestyle collectibles,” reflecting an “expression of identity shaped as much by personal pleasure and social connection as by financial motivation.”
That sentence may be the truest measure of where the art world stands in 2025: wealth is transferring, tastes are diversifying, and collecting—once the province of legacy—is now an act of self-definition, or if you’re more cynical, of branding.
