In 1866 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, in their discursive book Idées et Sensations, wrote that “The thing that hears the most stupid things in the world is perhaps a painting in a museum”. I think time has proved them right. Today, one of art’s main functions is to sit silently on the wall absorbing all our nonsense, like a great sponge of human twaddle.
The art market has become one of the chief factories of twaddle. The latest example is what Fortune magazine has dubbed the “Great Art Transfer”. This is part of the so-called “Great Wealth Transfer”, in which more than $100 trillion (depending on whose estimates you believe) is forecast to change hands in the US over the next two decades or so as the Baby Boomer generation ages. Deloitte and ArtTactic’s 2025 Art & Finance Report estimated that this will include $992bn in art and collectables over the next decade, or nearly $100bn per year.
I am sceptical. I think what we are really witnessing is a Great Public Relations Manoeuvre. The phrase Great Wealth Transfer has been used to market financial services since the 1990s. In 2012, Accenture gave it fresh legs by promoting “The Greater Wealth Transfer”. There is nothing new about rich people dying.
What is different now is that the financial services industry is increasingly offering art services. According to Deloitte, in 2011, only a quarter of wealth managers offered art-related services; today, half of them do. In the same 2025 report, Deloitte noted that the fine art market has maintained a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.2% over the previous 20 years. Not Nasdaq levels, but not bad.
Is that perception justified? I’m afraid not. The Artnet indices behind Deloitte’s figures measure movements in auction prices adjusted to include buyers’ premiums. They do not measure what an owner actually makes; on resale, the owner receives the hammer price less the seller’s commission and other costs. A work’s price will have to rise substantially, often at least 30%, simply to get back what you paid. The art market is very illiquid, with high participation costs. Moreover, Deloitte’s apparently healthy CAGR of 3.2% for “fine art” is not an average across the market, but comes from a separate, annually rebalanced Artnet index of the 100 highest-selling artists at auction.
Still, can we blame the art trade for getting in on the Great Wealth Transfer act? The stories I have seen in the press tend to go something like this: Daddy has a Canaletto and will soon die, so here is someone who can help you sell it, for a fee, and advise you what to buy instead, also for a fee. Remarkably, the best art to buy turns out to be whatever the person being interviewed happens to sell.
These Great Art Transfer stories tell us less about what future generations will buy than about what today’s art market wants to sell. They also suggest there is no single art market, but many different markets, divided by taste, operating in different ways and competing against each other.
It is possible to make money from art, but usually it comes down more to luck than judgement. My advice remains simple; never buy art as an investment. Buy what you like. And remember that art, like the Goncourts’ long-suffering museum picture, has heard it all before.