The art market is growing again, its buyers are getting younger, and far fewer of them want to sell. For family offices, fine art is earning a place alongside every other asset on the balance sheet.
For most of the past two years, the art world spoke the language of correction. Prices softened at the top, major consignments thinned out, and dealers braced for worse. Then, in 2025, the mood turned.
The recovery was led by the people with the deepest pockets. And the buyers coming back to the market are behaving differently from those who left it: they are younger, more varied in taste, and increasingly inclined to buy for the long term. For the galleries that sell fine art and the family offices that buy it, that shift is worth understanding in detail.
The money comes back
The headline figures tell the story plainly. Global art sales rose 4% to an estimated $59.6 billion in 2025, according to the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2026. The top end did the heavy lifting. Public auctions rebounded. Dealers turning over more than $10 million returned to growth. In the US, sales climbed 5% to $26 billion, carrying the market above its 2019 level.
London and Paris are holding their ground. The US takes 44% of global sales by value, the UK remains a firm second at 18%, and France, now the EU's largest market, edged up to 8%. Dealers are cautiously cheerful: 43% expect sales to improve this year, and those in France and the UK are among the most optimistic in Europe.
A new generation at the table
The faces around the table are changing. Nearly three quarters of active high net worth collectors are now millennials or Gen Z, according to the Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025, which polled 3,100 high net worth individuals across ten markets.
The chequebooks, for now, still belong largely to their parents. Boomers spend the most, close to $993,000 on average, against roughly $523,000 for millennials. Their tastes diverge, too. Boomers buy paintings, the bedrock of any serious collection. Their children range further, with millennials drawn to prints, photography and works on paper, and Gen Z leading in digital, film and video.
Women, meanwhile, are outspending men. In 2024, high net worth women spent 46% more on art and antiques, led by younger collectors with an appetite for a more diverse roster of artists.
Collectors with a committee
Then there are the family offices: quieter than the headline collectors and, in many ways, more consequential. Among those that invest in art, Deloitte Private and ArtTactic have put the average allocation at 13.4% of the portfolio, well ahead of private banks.
They buy differently, too. A painting may need to win over an investment committee before it reaches a wall. Provenance and condition reports are expected as a matter of course. And every purchase is weighed against the rest of the portfolio and the family's time horizon, which is usually measured in generations.
Buy, hold, bequeath
If one finding captures the moment, it is this: collectors have stopped looking for the exit. The share planning to sell collapsed from 55% to 25% in a single year. Self reported allocations to art rose from 15% of wealth to 20%, reaching 28% among those with more than $50 million. These are collectors' own estimates, and Deloitte's broader measure places art and collectibles closer to 10% of wealth. The direction of travel, however, is the same.
Inheritance is a large part of the story. Almost 90% of Gen Z collectors who inherited art kept it, citing family tradition. That matters, because there is a great deal to inherit. Deloitte estimates that the art and collectible wealth held by ultra high net worth individuals grew 18% between 2022 and 2024 to $2.56 trillion, much of it due to change hands over the coming decade.
Deloitte describes art as both an alternative capital asset and a form of personal expression. For today's buyers, the two are hard to separate. They want the work they love. They also want to know where it came from, what condition it is in, what it might be worth, and how it fits within everything else the family owns.
Beautiful, and illiquid
None of this makes art a simple investment. Art rewards patience and punishes haste. It offers diversification away from listed markets, a tangible store of value and, for the right works, real appreciation over time. It also trades rarely, costs a great deal to buy and sell, prices in private, and lives or dies on attribution, provenance and condition.
Owners are learning to work with those quirks. Lending secured against art reached an estimated $29.2 billion to $34.1 billion in 2023, according to Deloitte, as collections began to double as a source of liquidity. For family offices, the debate has moved on. The question now is how art is documented, valued and reported alongside everything else.
What galleries should take from this
For galleries, the family office buyer represents an opportunity with unusual staying power: deep capital, long horizons and the potential for a relationship that spans several acquisitions.
Winning that buyer calls for a slightly different approach. Curation counts for more than catalogue size. Provenance, exhibition history and condition reports need to be ready before the first conversation, along with pricing and valuation context an investment committee can work with. And the closer a work sits to the family's consolidated view of its wealth, the easier it becomes to say yes.
Where art meets the balance sheet
The distance between where art is discovered and where wealth is managed is shrinking. Family offices increasingly expect to see opportunities, fine art among them, in the same place they monitor and report on everything else.
That is the thinking behind Landytech's Marketplace, which brings curated opportunities from selected galleries into the platform family offices already use to oversee their wealth. For galleries, it offers a considered route to a qualified audience. For buyers, it offers a way to discover exceptional work with the context they need. To find out more, contact info@landytech.com.
Sources:
- Art Basel and UBS, The Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2026, Arts Economics (March 2026)
- Art Basel and UBS, The Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025, Arts Economics (October 2025)
- Deloitte Private and ArtTactic, Art & Finance Report 2025
- Deloitte Private and ArtTactic, Art & Finance Report 2023
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