This report draws principally on the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report series and the Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting series, both authored by Dr. Clare McAndrew of Arts Economics. The Market Report, published annually in spring, provides macro-level analysis of global art market sales, dealer data, and auction house performance. The Survey of Global Collecting, published separately each autumn, surveys high-net-worth individuals directly about their collecting behavior, spending, motivations, and demographics. The 2025 edition of the Survey — the most recent available as of this report — surveyed 3,100 HNWIs across ten markets in mid-2025, with a sample deliberately divided between women (1,575 respondents, or 51 percent) and men (49 percent), and with 74 percent of respondents from the Millennial and Gen Z generations. This methodological design reflects the report’s deliberate focus on gender and generational dynamics — the same dynamics that are the subject of this report.
Additional data draws on McKinsey research on women and wealth management, Bank of America Institute analysis of the Great Wealth Transfer, Cerulli Associates wealth transfer projections, Artsy collector surveys, Sotheby’s generational bidding data, and Hyperallergic’s demographic analysis of the world’s top collectors. Where figures from different sources give different estimates for the same phenomenon — as is common with Great Wealth Transfer projections, which vary depending on methodology and scope — this report cites the source and acknowledges the range. The structural argument does not depend on any single figure.
For most of the twentieth century, the canonical image of the serious art collector was specific enough to be a caricature: male, middle-aged or older, North American or Western European, with inherited or self-made wealth and a taste shaped by the modernist canon. He bought Picasso because he had been told by the right people that Picasso was important. He bought again when the price confirmed the judgment, and the price confirmed the judgment because people like him were buying. The circularity was the system. Taste and money moved together through a small fraternity of buyers who knew each other, trusted the same advisors, attended the same auctions, and together constituted the market — which is to say, they constituted the validation apparatus that decided which artists mattered, which galleries were serious, and which mediums were worth institutional attention.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a market description. Economists who study the art market have documented it with precision. The superstar phenomenon — the concentration of auction value in a very small number of artists, predominantly male, predominantly in media those collectors favored — is the mathematical expression of a taste-formation system in which a small, demographically homogeneous group of buyers provided the demand that shaped the supply. Galleries represented what those buyers wanted. Museums acquired what those galleries sold. Critics reviewed what those museums showed. The collector at the top of that chain was not the only force in the system, but he was the initiating force, and his demographics were not incidental to the outcomes.
That collector is aging. His children and grandchildren are entering the market with different demographics, different taste-formation habits, and — increasingly — different checkbooks. His widow, statistically speaking, will outlive him — American women’s life expectancy runs more than five years past men’s, and wives are typically younger than their husbands besides and will inherit control of assets he managed for decades. The institutional apparatus has not yet caught up with any of this. The galleries, auction houses, and museums that were built to serve the canonical collector are still, in their programming and their acquisition policies and their institutional self-image, largely organized around a buyer who is no longer the growth story. The growth story is somewhere else entirely.
This report documents where it is. It traces the demographic shift in art collecting that is already underway — in the gender data, in the generational data, in the Great Wealth Transfer projections — and argues that the Museum of Mosaic Environments is positioned to serve a collector base that the existing institutional apparatus has been slow to recognize and slower still to program for. Understanding who that collector is, what she buys, why she buys it, and what institutional relationship she is looking for is not a peripheral development consideration. It is the foundation of the MME’s development strategy.
Hyperallergic’s demographic analysis of the world’s 200 most influential art collectors — an analysis of ARTnews’s annual Top 200 collectors ranking — found that men dominated the art collecting scene and that the vast majority of those collectors lived in North America and Europe. The average age of a collector, per the Larry’s List global Art Collector Report, was 59 — and 71 percent of collectors were men. The market those collectors built was not arbitrary. It reflected their tastes — for oil on canvas, for abstract expressionism and its successors, for the autographic mark of a single artist working alone — and their risk tolerance, which was, in market terms, deeply conservative despite its avant-garde surface. As Clare McAndrew, the author of the Art Basel and UBS reports, has described the mechanism: the biggest way to reduce risk is to buy what everyone else is buying. The superstar phenomenon — a tiny number of artists capturing a disproportionate share of auction value — is not a market anomaly. It is the rational behavior of buyers who learned to follow each other.
Between 2018 and the first half of 2023, Sotheby’s data showed that Baby Boomers accounted for an average of 41 percent of bidding activity among the top 50 artists at auction at the $1 million-plus level, followed by Gen X at 30 percent and Millennials at 23 percent. The market for blue-chip art — the Picassos, the Basquiats, the works that set headline auction records — was built on Boomer demand, and it reflects Boomer taste. The medium that Boomers systematically undervalued, mosaic, is the medium that the market’s dominant generation never prioritized. The market’s structural neglect of mosaic is not aesthetic. It is demographic.
The Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025 surveyed 3,100 high-net-worth individuals across ten markets in mid-2025 and found that 74 percent of respondents were Millennial or Gen Z — a deliberate sampling choice that reflects where the market’s growth is occurring. Average collector spending totaled $438,990 across 14 works. HNWIs allocated an average of 20 percent of their wealth to their art collections in 2025, up from 15 percent the year before. Among Gen Z collectors, that allocation rose to 26 percent. The market is not contracting. It is rotating — from Boomer-dominated blue-chip accumulation toward a more diverse, more generationally varied field of buyers with different priorities and, critically, different medium preferences.
The generational spending data has shifted meaningfully in the last three years. Up to 2022, Millennials led in average HNW spending on art. In 2023, following a downturn in the speculative ultra-contemporary market, Millennial spending dropped by roughly half, to a $395,000 average, and Gen X became the top spending generation at $578,000, a lead it held through the first half of 2024. By full-year 2024, the retrenchment had already reversed: Millennials retook the lead among the rising generations at $523,330 on average — with Millennial women, at $643,700, outspending nearly every other segment. Boomers, the smallest generational sample in current surveys, remain the highest average spenders at nearly $993,000 — but Boomers are the declining cohort. The wealth transfer is underway, and the recipients are collecting differently.
| Generation | Avg. HNW Art Spend (2024) | Key Characteristics | Medium Preferences | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Silent / Boomer | ~$993,000 (highest avg.) | Established collectors; blue-chip focus; declining cohort | Paintings dominant; traditional fine art hierarchy | Art Basel/UBS Survey 2025 |
| Gen X | ~$578,000 (highest by generation, 2023) | Steady, experienced; works with advisors most (43% of APAA clients) | Paintings 28% of holdings; highest fine art painting spend | Art Basel/UBS Survey 2024/25 |
| Millennial | $523,330 (2024, retook the lead) | Values-driven; social collectors; online-first; fastest growing cohort | Design, decorative arts, jewelry; lifestyle collecting | Art Basel/UBS Survey 2024/25 |
| Gen Z | More than double Millennial and Gen X averages in works on paper, digital art, photography, and film and video art (2025) | Most digital; highest art allocation (26% of wealth); identity-driven | Digital art, film and video, cross-disciplinary | Art Basel/UBS Survey 2025 |
Source: Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025; Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2024; Sotheby’s Insight Report: Generational Bidding Data 2018–2023. Average spend figures are self-reported by surveyed HNWIs.
In 2024, high-net-worth female collectors spent 46 percent more on art and antiques than their male counterparts, according to the Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025. The figure deserves to sit on a page by itself for a moment, because the art world’s institutional behavior has not yet registered what it implies. The dominant collector of record — the Boomer male whose tastes shaped museum acquisition policies, gallery rosters, and auction categories for fifty years — is now being outspent, by a substantial margin, by a demographic the same institutions have historically treated as secondary. The signal is not new: in 2020, female collectors’ median expenditure rose 13 percent to $154,000, overtaking their male peers for the first time in the Art Basel and UBS survey record. Women’s medians led again in 2021 and 2022. By 2024, women’s average spending was 46 percent above men’s.
This is not a one-year anomaly. The trend has been directional across successive survey editions, driven by two converging forces. The first is earned income: more women than at any previous point in history are the primary financial decision-makers in their households, either as breadwinners or as newly independent financial agents following inheritance or divorce. The second is inherited wealth: the Great Wealth Transfer is routing an extraordinary volume of assets toward women. Cerulli Associates projects that of the $124 trillion, close to $100 trillion will go to women — $54 trillion to surviving spouses, more than 95 percent of whom are women, and $47 trillion to younger female inheritors — figures the Bank of America Institute put at the center of its 2025 women-and-wealth analysis. McKinsey projects that by 2030, women will control approximately $34 trillion of investable assets in the United States alone, up from $7.3 trillion a decade ago.
What female collectors do with that wealth is not the same as what the canonical male collector did. And the differences are not merely aesthetic. They are structural — patterns of behavior that, as they scale with the wealth transfer, will reshape which mediums get validated, which artists get collected, and which institutions receive the philanthropic support that determines long-term cultural authority.
The 2025 Survey of Global Collecting found that female collectors were significantly more likely than men to buy work by unknown artists — 55 percent of female respondents reported buying works by unknown artists frequently or often, against 44 percent of men — and this despite more than half of all respondents rating such purchases high risk. Forty-nine percent of the works in female collectors’ holdings were by female artists, compared with 40 percent among male collectors — against a backdrop in which the overall share of female artists’ works in HNW collections has climbed from 33 percent in 2018 to 44 percent in 2025. Female collectors were more likely to cross medium boundaries: women had higher interest than men in every medium category except paintings, sculpture, and works on paper — specifically, they showed stronger interest in photography, installations, textile-based art, and digital art.
That last list is worth dwelling on. Textile-based art. Photography. Installations. These are the medium categories that have historically been dismissed as craft, as applied art, as less serious than painting and sculpture — the same hierarchy this report series has documented throughout. And they are the categories in which female collectors now outstrip their male counterparts in stated interest — and, in photography, in outright spending, at more than double the male average. This is not coincidence. As Clare McAndrew, the report’s author, noted in her commentary on the 2025 findings: “Women are equally aware of potential risks yet often more willing to embrace them in practice — purchasing across a broader range of non-traditional mediums and actively supporting emerging and unknown artists.” The female collector is, in other words, structurally predisposed to exactly the kind of collecting the MME is positioned to enable: non-traditional medium, unknown or emerging artists, values-driven acquisition.
The values dimension is specifically documented. The Art Basel and UBS Survey series has tracked, across multiple editions, the motivations that distinguish younger and female collectors from the Boomer baseline. Men were the most likely to name financial investment as their primary motivation. Women over-indexed on every other register the survey measures: pleasure and self-identity, social connection, and — in the sharpest single-year rise in the series — philanthropic support of artists and culture, named by 16 percent of women in 2025, up from almost nothing the year before. UBS Chief Economist Paul Donovan described the shift in exactly these terms: “As younger generations and more women assume stewardship of wealth, their collecting choices increasingly reflect personal values and social awareness. Many are drawn to art that speaks to identity, community, and purpose.” McAndrew’s own conclusion goes further: as wealth shifts “both vertically and horizontally over the coming years, these trends are likely to foster greater balance and diversity in collecting in future.”
There is a specific behavioral asymmetry in the 2025 survey data that has direct implications for the MME’s development strategy. The report found that, contrary to the persistent stereotype of women as more risk-averse investors, female collectors in practice showed a greater willingness to purchase across non-traditional mediums and to acquire works by unknown artists than their male counterparts. McAndrew was explicit about the mechanism: women report risk sensitivity on par with or higher than men’s — and then act anyway: across the survey’s scenarios, women were more likely than men to have taken the risk they had accurately priced. Women are more willing to acquire work in categories that have not yet been institutionally validated — which is, precisely, the category that mosaic occupies.
The reason this asymmetry exists is probably not that women are simply braver. It is more likely that the canonical validation hierarchy — the one built around Boomer male taste — was not designed for them. They are not buying Picasso because the system said Picasso was serious and they have internalized that judgment. They are buying differently because the judgment was never fully theirs to begin with. The female collector who acquires a textile-based installation or a work in a medium her male peer has not registered is not taking an uncalculated risk. She is following a different set of signals — her own taste, values alignment, direct artist relationships — that the market apparatus has historically not tracked because it was built around a different buyer.
For an institution championing a medium that has never been institutionally validated in the contemporary art market, this behavioral profile is the most important structural fact in the collector landscape.
The Great Wealth Transfer is the largest intergenerational shift of assets in recorded history. Cerulli Associates estimates that $124 trillion in US wealth will change hands by 2048 — the great majority of it, nearly $100 trillion, flowing from Baby Boomers and older generations — a figure larger than the entire world’s economic output for 2024 — roughly $112 trillion of global GDP. Of that total, approximately $62 trillion — more than half — will come from high-net-worth or ultra-high-net-worth households — the same tier that constitutes the active art market. Millennials are projected to receive the largest generational share over the next 25 years at $45.6 trillion, followed by Gen X at $39 trillion. Gen X receives the most within the next ten years.
The gender routing of those transfers is, as noted above, predominantly toward women. An estimated $54 trillion will pass to surviving spouses, 95 percent of whom are projected to be women, before passing further to Gen X and Millennial heirs. Another $47 trillion will shift directly to younger female inheritors. By 2030, McKinsey projects women will control approximately $34 trillion in US investable assets — close to double the current total. In Western Europe, women’s assets under management are projected to compound at 8.1 percent annually through 2030, against 2.7 percent for men.
The art market is a lagging indicator of these wealth shifts, because collecting relationships are slow to form and institutional reputation is slow to build. But the lag is not infinite. The collector who inherits $10 million from a Boomer parent in 2028 will make her first serious acquisition in the early 2030s — and the institutions she chooses to engage with will be the ones that were already speaking to her interests when she was forming her taste in the 2020s. The MME’s development window is the period before the transfer fully completes, when the relationship-building work that will determine which institutions capture the loyalty of the next collector generation can still be done.
A specific and important finding from the Art Basel and UBS surveys concerns the relationship between inherited collections and inheritor taste. Ninety-one percent of HNWI survey respondents already had works in their collections that were inherited or given to them, and 72 percent had kept at least some of those works, per the 2024 edition of the survey. Fewer than a third cited incompatibility with the rest of their collection as a reason for disposing of inherited works — most cited practical constraints like lack of space or inheritance tax obligations.
This suggests that the Boomer collection does not get dismantled by the next generation. The Picassos stay on the walls. But they do not define the next generation’s collecting identity in the way they defined the Boomer’s. The inherited works are a legacy, not a taste formation. The works the next generation chooses to buy — without inheritance, using their own resources, in dialogue with their own values — are different. Millennials, the survey found, show particular interest in design, decorative arts, and jewelry, collecting across mediums in ways their predecessors did not. Gen Z collectors are most active in digital art and film and video art, and out-spend both Millennials and Gen X in nearly every medium outside painting and sculpture; Millennials are the most active buyers of prints, photography, and works on paper. And female collectors at every generational level are more likely than their male peers to acquire works in media the canonical hierarchy has not fully recognized.
The critical implication is this: the next generation of collectors is not simply a younger version of the last. The Millennial woman who inherits her father’s Basquiat does not become a Basquiat collector. She becomes a collector who owns a Basquiat, and who will spend her own discretionary collecting budget on something that reflects her own formation — a formation that is more cross-disciplinary, more values-driven, more open to non-traditional media, and less anchored to the institutional validation system that told her father’s generation what was worth buying.
The art world’s institutional apparatus has been slow to adapt to these shifts. Auction houses, recognizing the Millennial and Gen Z demographic, have invested heavily in online platforms and social media presence. Galleries have broadened their digital channels. But the deeper institutional question — not how to sell to the next generation, but what to sell them, whose work to represent, which mediums to take seriously — has not yet been answered with the same urgency.
The reason is structural. Institutions built for and by the canonical collector take their legitimacy from that collector’s endorsement. The major auction houses still report their auction results in terms of the same small number of blue-chip artists that Boomer collectors made famous. Major museums still have acquisition committees dominated by Boomer-era donors whose taste and networks reflect the previous paradigm. The critical apparatus — the journals, the biennials, the prize structures — still overwhelmingly prioritizes painting and sculpture in media that the canonical collector valued. These institutions are not deliberately excluding the next collector. They are lagging, because institutional change is always slow and because the economic incentives of the existing model are powerful enough to delay adaptation.
That lag is an opportunity. The collector who will be spending seriously in 2030 and 2035 is forming her institutional relationships now — through which fairs she attends, which institutions she donates to, which advisory relationships she builds, which museum memberships she joins. The institution that speaks to her values, her medium interests, and her self-image as a collector in 2026 will have a relationship that the institution that adapts its programming in 2032 will not.
The structural argument of this report resolves to a specific profile. The MME’s natural early collector base — the community most likely to engage with the institution from its earliest years, to acquire works from its commissioning program, to join its patron circles, and eventually to make the significant gifts that define institutional collecting history — is not the canonical Boomer male collector. He is a declining demographic, his taste is already served by existing institutions, and his medium preferences do not include the one the MME champions.
The natural early collector is, in aggregate: female, Millennial or Gen X, values-driven, open to non-traditional media, motivated by artist relationships and institutional alignment rather than blue-chip validation, and increasingly possessed of the financial resources that the Great Wealth Transfer is routing toward her cohort. She is the collector who outspent her male peers by 46 percent in 2024. She is the collector of whom 55 percent frequently or often buy works by artists they have never heard of. She is the collector who shows higher interest in textile-based art, photography, and installations than her male equivalent — and who, when she sees a medium that shares those aesthetic and material properties but has a history stretching back to Byzantium, will understand immediately why no one has built a museum for it before, and what it means that someone is building one now.
She attends more art events than her male peers — an average of 55 art-related events in 2024, ten more than her male peers — with her lead concentrated exactly where institutions live: museum and gallery exhibitions and artist studio visits. She uses social media to discover artists and develop collecting interests. She is more likely to be motivated by community and experience than by private transaction. She is building a collection that reflects who she is, not what an advisor told her was safe. And she is, right now, in the process of deciding which institutions deserve her loyalty for the next three decades.
There is a specific and remarkable convergence between the medium preferences of the emerging female and Millennial collector base and the medium the MME exists to champion. The 2025 Survey of Global Collecting found that women had higher stated interest than men in textile-based art. This is not, in isolation, about mosaic. But it is about the category of media that mosaic belongs to — labor-intensive, tactile, material, assembled from fragments — that the canonical hierarchy dismissed as craft and that the emerging collector base is revaluing in real time.
This revaluation is visible in the auction and primary market data for textiles and ceramics, documented in Forensic Examination of Aesthetic Value in the Market. The Tate’s textile program, the National Gallery of Art’s Woven Histories exhibition, the entry of ceramics into fine art recognition through the Turner Prize and blue-chip gallery representation — these are not isolated events. They are the leading edge of a taste shift driven by exactly the collector demographics documented in this report: younger, female, values-aligned, open to non-traditional media. Mosaic has not yet benefited from this shift in the way textiles and ceramics have, because no institution has positioned it to benefit. The MME will be that institution — and its timing coincides precisely with the generational and gender transition in collecting that makes the Fine Art Recognition Framework possible.
The additional dimension is geographic. The MME’s location on the Iberian Peninsula — within the tradition of Roman mosaic floors, Byzantine sacred programs, and the extraordinary azulejo tile heritage that runs through Portuguese public culture — gives the institution a regional identity that resonates with the experience and travel collecting patterns of exactly the international collector demographic most likely to engage with it. The female Millennial collector who has been to Lisbon, who has walked the streets of a city whose subway stations are lined with narrative tile programs, who has stood in front of the azulejo panels in the National Tile Museum, already has a relationship with the medium — whether or not she has named it yet.
The following are the MME’s development strategy implications that flow directly from this analysis. They are not exhaustive; they represent the structural commitments that the collector data argues for.
The canonical collector who built the twentieth-century art market made his most consequential decisions not when he wrote the largest checks, but when he decided, early and before consensus, that a particular artist or medium deserved serious attention. The decision to buy Jasper Johns in 1958, or Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1982, or Damien Hirst in 1990, was a decision to initiate the validation sequence — to set in motion the gallery representation, the museum acquisition, the critical apparatus, the auction price escalation — that turned an unknown into a blue-chip. The collector who made those early decisions did not merely reflect the market. He made it.
The market-making collector of the next generation is not the same person. She is younger, she is more likely to be female, her wealth is arriving through the largest intergenerational transfer in history, her taste was formed by different signals, and she is actively looking for the institutions and mediums that align with her values and her self-image as a collector. She outspent her male peers by 46 percent in 2024. She is more likely to buy work by unknown artists. She is more interested in textile-based and installation art. She is building a collection that the existing institutional apparatus was not designed for — and she knows it.
The Museum of Mosaic Environments is not simply a museum for a neglected medium. It is an institution positioned at the exact intersection of the collector transition that is already underway: a medium whose recognition sequence has not yet begun, a collector demographic that is predisposed to exactly the kind of non-traditional acquisition the MME enables, and a moment in the wealth transfer when institutional relationships that will last decades are being formed. The institution that captures the loyalty of the next generation of major collectors will be the institution that spoke to them first, with authority and conviction, about something they already cared about without knowing it had a name.
That is what the MME is positioned to be. Not the last institution to validate mosaic after the market has already moved — but the first, the one whose founding patron circle looked at a medium dismissed as craft for two hundred years and recognized, before consensus, what it was worth.
The Collector Gap sits within a network of reports that together document both the structural mechanisms of exclusion and the institutional conditions for reversal.
Designed to Fail establishes the historical framework for the exclusion hierarchy — the institutional sequence that removed applied and decorative arts from fine art recognition beginning with Vasari and codified through successive academy formations. The collector market that The Collector Gap analyzes is the demand-side expression of the same hierarchy.
The Mosaic Record documents mosaic’s critical and market absence in the contemporary record. The demographic argument in The Collector Gap — that the medium has lacked a collector base predisposed to it — is the demand-side explanation for that absence.
What Institutions Are Worth examines how valuation infrastructure — published acquisition prices, scholarly documentation, fine art appraisal standards — functions as collector confidence infrastructure. The development strategy recommendations in §4.3 of The Collector Gap depend on this analysis directly.
Class, Craft, and the Tradesman’s Hand examines the class dimension of medium dismissal: the canonical hierarchy’s equation of labor-intensive, tactile, assembled-from-fragments work with the tradesman’s hand rather than the artist’s. The Boomer collector whose taste shaped fifty years of market validation was operating inside that hierarchy. The collector gap is partly its demand-side expression.
The following table consolidates primary data points cited throughout this report for use in development strategy, investor materials, and institutional communications.
| Statistic | Figure | Source / Year |
|---|---|---|
| Total global art market sales, 2025 | $59.6 billion | Art Basel/UBS Art Market Report 2026 |
| Average HNW collector art spending (2024/25) | $438,990 across 14 works | Art Basel/UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025 |
| HNW collector wealth allocated to art, 2025 | 20% avg. (28% for UHNW) | Art Basel/UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025 |
| Gen Z collectors’ wealth allocated to art | 26% | Art Basel/UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025 |
| Female HNW collectors’ spending vs. male peers, 2024 | 46% more | Art Basel/UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025 |
| Female collectors open to acquiring unknown artists | 55% | Art Basel/UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025 |
| Works by female artists in female collectors’ holdings | 49% | Art Basel/UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025 |
| Works by female artists in male collectors’ holdings | 40% | Art Basel/UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025 |
| Female gallery representation (primary market, 2025) | 50% — parity reached (representation; sales value remains below parity) | Art Basel/UBS Art Market Report 2026 |
| Gen X average HNW art spend (highest generation, 2023) | ~$578,000 | Art Basel/UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2024/25 |
| Boomer average HNW art spend (2024/25) | ~$993,000 | Art Basel/UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025 |
| Boomer share of top-50 artist auction bidding, 2018–H1 2023 | 41% average | Sotheby’s Insight Report |
| Gen X + Millennial share of Basquiat bidder pool, H1 2023 | 57% | Sotheby’s Insight Report |
| Total Great Wealth Transfer projected by 2048 (US wealth) | $124 trillion | Cerulli Associates, December 2024 |
| Share of Great Wealth Transfer going to women | ~$100 trillion of $124 trillion | Cerulli Associates, 2025 (reported by Bank of America Institute) |
| Women’s investable assets in US projected by 2030 | $34 trillion (up from $7.3 trillion) | McKinsey / Bloomberg, 2024 |
| Women’s assets CAGR through 2030 (Western Europe) | 8.1% vs. 2.7% for men | McKinsey & Company, 2024 |
| Women’s share of the world’s ultra-high-net-worth individuals ($30m+) | ~11% in 2023 (up from 6.5% in 2016) | Altrata / Wealth-X data, via Julius Baer, 2023 |
Sources: Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025; Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2026; Sotheby’s Insight Report (Generational Bidding); Cerulli Associates U.S. High-Net-Worth Markets 2024; Bank of America Institute 2025; McKinsey & Company Women as the Next Wave of Growth in US Wealth Management (2020/2024 update).
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McAndrew, C. / Arts Economics. (2024). The Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2024. Art Basel / UBS. artbasel.com
McAndrew, C. / Arts Economics. (2021). The Art Market 2021. Art Basel / UBS. artbasel.com
Sotheby’s. Insight Report: Generational Bidding Activity Among Top 50 Artists, 2018–2023. sothebys.com
Artsy. (2019). The Online Art Collector Survey. artsy.net
Cerulli Associates. (2024). The Great Wealth Transfer: Capturing Money in Motion. U.S. High-Net-Worth and Ultra-High-Net-Worth Markets Report.
McKinsey & Company. (2020, updated 2024). Women as the Next Wave of Growth in US Wealth Management. mckinsey.com
Bank of America Institute. (2025). Women and the Great Wealth Transfer. bankofamerica.com
Bloomberg Intelligence. (December 2024). Massive Wealth Transfer Will Give Women $34 Trillion by 2030. bloomberg.com
CNBC. (March 2025). Women Will Get Most of the $124 Trillion Great Wealth Transfer. cnbc.com
Hyperallergic. (2014). A Demographic Breakdown of the World’s 200 Top Art Collectors. hyperallergic.com
Larry’s List. Art Collector Report. larryslist.com/report.php
The Art Newspaper. (October 2025). Wealthy Women Spent 46% More on Art Than Male Peers in 2024. theartnewspaper.com
The Art Newspaper. (October 2024). Gen X Are the Biggest Spenders on Art as Speculative Millennials Drop Back. theartnewspaper.com
Art Basel. (December 2024). Emerging from the Shadows, Gen X Are Now the Biggest Spenders. artbasel.com
Art Basel. (October 2025). Seven Takeaways from the 2025 Survey of Global Collecting. artbasel.com
ARTnews. (November 2025). Art Basel UBS Collectors Report Shows Women, Gen Z Rule the Art Market. artnews.com
This report was developed through an iterative, fact-checked, and edited collaborative research process between Rachael Que Vargas and Anthropic’s Claude (in two roles — long-form research and document operations). The questions, institutional framework, and editorial judgment are the author’s; the research synthesis and structural development are collaborative.
© 2026 Rachael Que Vargas / Museum of Mosaic Environments. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). You may share and adapt this work for non-commercial purposes with attribution. Full license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/