Gen Z Collectors Are Taking Up Space in the Art Market, Survey Finds
Gen Z may be the art world’s most discussed demographic, but the numbers now suggest something more concrete: the generation is already a sizable share of the buying public. The 2025 Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting reports that Gen Z — born from the mid-1990s through the early 2010s — accounts for nearly a fifth of active collectors globally.
That statistical foothold is beginning to show up in how younger buyers describe their ambitions: less deference to established hierarchies, more appetite for discovery, and a stronger emphasis on community and lived experience than on auction-room visibility.
One example is Patrick Finnegan, a 29-year-old venture capitalist who says his collecting is driven by feeling as much as by strategy. “I connect with art very emotionally,” he said, adding that while he can “think like a value investor,” collecting is ultimately about “living with and sharing beautiful stories — seeing the world through someone else’s perspective.”
Finnegan began collecting in earnest six years ago after friends introduced him to emerging artists. Today, he works with celebrity advisor Ralph DeLuca — known for advising film stars and directors — and uses Instagram as a key tool for finding new work. His recent acquisitions point to a growing interest in abstraction by emerging women artists, including Caroline Absher, Pauline Rintsch, Jo Messer, and Thalita Hamaoui.
When asked what Gen Z is changing, Finnegan framed it as a matter of confidence and timing. “We’re fearless,” he said. “We don’t just follow the herd — we spot trends early and, in many cases, help create them.”
For other young collectors, the shift is less about trendmaking than about building cultural infrastructure. California-born Matilda Liu, who moved to London in 2016 to study curation and art business, has developed a collection that moves between emerging artists such as Gus Monday and established blue-chip names, including British sculptor Antony Gormley. Her collecting, she has said, grows out of relationships with galleries on both sides of the Atlantic.
Liu has also formalized the social dimension of collecting through Meeting Point Projects, an initiative that hosts supper clubs and exhibitions designed to bring people into conversation around art. “Increasingly, I think younger collectors are motivated by participation within cultural ecosystems rather than by auction visibility alone,” she explained. “Luxury today is less about brand names and objects as trophies, and more about taste, value systems, and community.”
A third collector, Abby Smidt, offers a different model of Gen Z engagement: looking backward with intensity rather than treating the past as settled territory. A bicoastal collector, Smidt is drawn to artists of the 1960s, particularly those associated with Southern California’s Light and Space movement, whose sculptures and installations often manipulate natural or artificial illumination. “I’m just fascinated with the quality of light and the colors that emerge,” she said.
Smidt’s interest is also shaped by family history. Her parents, Eric and Susan, are prominent collectors of Abstract Expressionism, and she grew up around art. Still, she traces her own fixation to a specific encounter: an internship at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) during a James Turrell retrospective. Since then, her focus has expanded to women artists long under-credited within Light and Space, including Mary Corse and Helen Pashgian.
At 27, Smidt has built relationships with artists who are decades older — many still working into their 80s and 90s. “They’re all still on this beautiful trajectory,” she said. “I feel like I’m collecting alongside their career[s].”
Taken together, these accounts suggest that Gen Z’s growing presence is not only a matter of market share. It is also a shift in collecting’s self-image: from status signaling to participation, from inherited consensus to personal conviction, and from passive consumption to a more hands-on role in shaping what — and who — gets seen next.
