The New Collector Is Younger, and Often a Woman
Wealthy women outspent their male peers on art and antiques by 46% in 2024 — but only in two generations, and the reverse held in the other two. The buyer is changing, and the galleries built for the old one are still talking to him.
The Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting, published in October 2025 from fieldwork across ten markets, contains one finding that has been repeated everywhere and one qualification that has been repeated almost nowhere.
The finding: in 2024, high-net-worth women outspent their male peers on art and antiques by 46% on average. The qualification: that gap held among Gen Z and millennial collectors and reversed among Gen X and boomers. Anyone writing that wealthy women outspend wealthy men on art, flat, is overstating a real result.
What the survey actually shows
Three differences are larger than the spending gap and more useful than it.
- Works by female artists made up 49% of the works in women's collections and 40% of those in men's — rising to 55% among American women and 54% in Japan.
- Of the women surveyed, 55% bought works by artists they did not know frequently or often, against 44% of men, in a sample where 52% of everyone rated that behaviour high-risk.
- In mainland China, Japan and Germany, average spend by women ran at or above twice the male figure.
A buyer who is more willing to back an unknown name and more likely to buy work by women is not a variation on the existing collector. It is a different demand curve, and it points at different galleries.
The market has not caught up
In 2025, female artists reached 45% of those represented across all dealers and 50% at primary-market galleries — and 37% of sales by value. The representation moved; the money moved less.
Being shown is not the same as being bought, and the eight-point gap between the two is where the next decade of this market gets decided.
The caveat that has to travel with the numbers
The survey sampled 3,100 people screened as active HNW art buyers, and 74% of them were Gen Z or millennial. That is a sample of a particular kind of collector, not a census of wealthy people, and generational splits drawn from it describe that sample rather than the collecting population at large.
It is also self-reported. We are quoting it because it is the best instrument that exists and because Art Basel and UBS publish their method, not because a survey of buyers is the same thing as a measurement of buying.
Why this matters on this coastline
Because the household arriving here is frequently making the cultural decisions through one person, and the assumption in most galleries and most private banks is still that it is the other one. The wealth is increasingly held or directed by women, and a room that addresses the spouse rather than the buyer loses the account without ever knowing it had one.
The practical version, for anyone selling into this market: the question is not whether to have work by women on the wall. It is whether the person who walks in is treated as the principal. And for anyone buying: the survey says your peers are backing unknown names more often than the auction record suggests, which is a hint about where the interesting part of the market currently is.
