News of the art market may be relentlessly doomful of late, but this year’s Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting throws up some unexpected and, occasionally, optimistic findings.
The lengthy report, published today and running to almost 200 pages, looks at the buying behaviour of more than 3,660 high net-worth individuals (HNWIs) from 14 regions during 2023 and the first half of 2024.
Some of the key findings counter prevailing anecdotal reporting. Despite a tough market, median spending has not fallen enormously, and Chinese buying remains strong. Gen X buyers are playing a bigger role as more speculative millennials have stepped back. Collectors at the very top appear to have the strongest holdings of work by female artists. And the younger generation is generally not averse to the art it inherits.
The report, authored as usual by Clare McAndrew, the founder of Arts Economics, is three in one this year: the survey of HNWIs conducted by McAndrew in collaboration with UBS, which makes up with bulk of it, a smaller, new survey of more than 1,400 Art Basel VIPs, plus a report from the Association of Professional Art Advisors (APAA).
Overall spend
McAndrew writes in the introduction that sales in the art market slowed over 2023, falling by 4% to $65bn. She identifies the high end of the market, "which was so pivotal in driving sales out of contraction in 2020", as thinning out considerably, "creating a drag on growth despite more positive performance in some other lower-priced segments." In 2024, "the persistent backdrop of geopolitical tensions, trade fragmentation, higher-for-longer interest rates, and other region-specific issues continue to weigh on the sentiment and plans of buyers and sellers."
And yet, the HNWI survey found that while average spending dropped by 32% last year (to just under $363,905), median spending (less skewed by outliers) stayed almost the same, only falling from $50,165 in 2022 to $50,000 in 2023. Half year spend for 2024 would indicate it will remain around the same this year. This, McAndrew says, suggests that the majority of the decline was due to reduced spending at the higher end of the market. Of the HNWIs surveyed, 91% were optimistic about the art market's fortunes over the next six months, compared to 77% at the end of 2023. “One of the key drivers of the slowdown in the market over 2023 was a contraction in sales of the highest-priced works at auction, most noticeably those sold at over $10m,” McAndrew writes. “One very reassuring thing the survey showed was that even while the top end of the market slowed down, the middle was fairly stable,” she tells The Art Newspaper.
Art was also seen as a relatively safe investment by more than 85% of the HNWIs, with less than 10% feeling that macroeconomic factors such as financial market volatility, high interest rates or inflation would lower art prices (most felt these would either have no impact or potentially raise the value of their art).
Generational shift
A marked shift is seen in the spending of millennial collectors, who were overtaken by Gen X respondents in 2023. Up until 2022, previous editions of the report found, it was millennials who were spending the most, thanks in particular a small group buying at the top end. Perhaps due to the downturn, this trend was reversed in 2023 with a 50% decrease in average spend by millennial HNWIs, to $395,000. Instead, Gen X collectors had the highest average spend in 2023, of $578,000, and their lead has continued into 2024. The respondents in this age range were spending a third more than Millennials and double that of the Boomer and Gen Z generation.
“The downshift in millennial spending, being replaced by Gen X, is interesting,” Noah Horowitz, the chief executive of Art Basel, tells The Art Newspaper. “That starts unveiling some of the froth in the market coming from younger maybe more speculative buyers and then an older generation that is maybe more focused on value.” As he adds: “Historically the great collections have been built in softer markets.”
McAndrew thinks “the people who have seen the market cycle in and out of these downturns before are a little bit more inclined to think, ‘ah we’ve been through worse than this before, it’s going to come back again’.” She adds: “I do think these cool downs shake out some of the more speculative buyers and sellers, and that’s not necessarily bad, it just means on the surface the market looks slower—some of the short-term transactions that give it that boost are shaken out when things aren’t going so well.”
And yet, as McAndrew says, although the past few years have been difficult economically for most, the number of billionaires has almost tripled—and their wealth quadrupled—since 2010. But that growth doesn’t necessarily seem to be expanding into their allocation of wealth spent on art—this peaked at 24% in 2022, but has fallen to 15% this year. Still, as McAndrew says, “15% is a huge proportion, and as the level of wealth goes up, so does the allocation to art [HNWIs worth over $50m allocated 25% of wealth to their collections].”
Horowitz also notes that this “highest stratum of the wealth surveyed had outsized holdings of female artists on a relative basis”. He is referring to the report’s findings that the number of works by female artists in the collections of HNWIs are at a seven-year high, at 44% compared to works by men. “This is something I saw supported in [Art Basel] Paris last week, where the highest price [for a work sold] was the Louise Bourgeois Spider [$20m],” Horowitz says.
Chinese buying
Around 300 HNWI collectors from mainland China responded to the survey, and they reported the highest spend of all on art and antiques in 2023 and the first half of 2024, with a median value of $97,000. That spend is more than double of any other region, with France in second place at $38,000, Italy at $32,000, the UK at $31,000 and Hong Kong at $28,000.
That figure, as Horowitz says, “flies in the face of what we read anecdotally” about Chinese buying slowing since the pandemic began. But it tallies with “strong attendance of Chinese and Asian VIPs” seen at last week’s Art Basel Paris. Some of those VIPs, he adds, “fit that Gen X profile of established collectors who are quite possibly looking at where there are opportunities of well-priced material, and looking to really lean in now in the face of a degree of market softness.”
Event attendance
McAndrew points out that the broader survey of a wider circle of wealthy art buying people (3,600 HNWI) and the smaller survey of 1,400 highly engaged (though not necessarily wealthy) Art Basel VIPs differed in habits. "Since the pandemic, the wider circle of HNWI visit more art events [fairs and gallery exhibitions] than ever, though they don’t necessarily buy there," McAndrew says. "Whereas the Art Basel inner circle are going to fewer events—down from an average of 89 events in 2019 to 51 in 2024." A lot of them are put off by the cost and hassle of travel, "and some by the fact that so many works are sold by the time the fair opens," she says.
The HNWIs, McAndrew notes, are much more likely to buy remotely, whereas the Art Basel VIP set prefer buying in person—73% through dealers and 26% through art fairs, more than double that of the wider HNWI survey.
Wealth transfer
Much has been written about the imminent great wealth transfer, with an estimated $6tn in wealth and assets being passed over the next 20 to 30 years by HNWIs. Alongside that is a predicted shift in taste: will millennial and Gen Z collectors want to keep the art of the Silent Generation and Boomers?
It seems they might—of the HNWI survey respondents, 91% already have works in their collections that that were inherited or given to them, and 72% have kept at least some of these works. Less than a third cited incompatibility with the rest of their collection as a reason for selling or donating those inherited works.
The actual reasons for offloading these works were much more practical—55% cited lack of space, while 47% sold or donated works in order to settle inheritance taxes. This figure tended to be highest in states with more stringent tax regimes, for instance in Japan (which has the highest global inheritance tax, of up to 55%) where it was the reason given that 72% of respondents no longer had any inherited works.
Succession planning was also a major concern for many HNWIs—80% said they were concerned about preserving it for their descendants, including Gen Zers. Around 65% of HNWIs plan to leave their collections to their partner or spouse (and have some kind of plan in place), while 43% have a similar plan to leave their art to their children. Almost half (49%) plan to leave some of their works to museums (this was over 60% in some regions such as the UK and Taiwan).
The APAA report
Both McAndrew and Horowitz point to the insightful findings of the APAA members’ survey at the end of the report. Alex Glauber, the APAA’s president, writes that by halfway through 2024, “APAA advisors were already on track to acquire approximately 23% more artworks in 2024 than 2023,” with 64% saying that they were predominantly buying works priced under $100,000 for clients, and most commonly between $25,000 and $50,000.
It is the auction acquisition data that stands out: by halfway through 2024, “the number of works acquired at auction by APAA advisors was already over 80% of those acquired in the full year of 2023, which suggests that year-end totals could show substantial growth year-on-year”, Glauber writes. “It is notable that this upward trend in volume is coming alongside a drop in purchase prices at auction for advisors of just over 65% (from $235,000 in 2023 to $142,000 in the first half of 2024). This parallels what was already underway in the auction market in 2023, with greater buoyancy and volumes at the lower end of the market.”
The APAA report’s deaccessioning data also "strongly indicates" that collectors are "selling from the bottom of their collections, deaccessioning more but lower-value works" with advisers being brought in to pare down "unwanted or insignificant artworks as opposed to selling opportunistically to capture appreciation, as had been the case over the last decade prior to the market cooling".