This is one of my favorite parts of the job being right on analytics. So without further delay, as I write this at almost 11pm Friday night, let’s get into the reality of what is going on, because as the many posts on Instagram will tell you, everything is going great. Back to growth after two consecutive years of decline.

The headline number is $59.6 billion. Up 4%. The art market is growing again. Everyone relax.

Right?

I have read every edition of the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report since its inception and I read this one the same way I read all of them, not for the headline, for what the headline is covering. The number is real. The recovery is real. And the picture underneath it is considerably more complicated than a single percentage point suggests.

Here we go!

What the number is made of

The $59.6 billion figure is doing significant work. A single painting, Gustav Klimt’s Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer, sold for $236 million at Sotheby’s New York in November, the second-highest auction price ever achieved. Six of the year’s top ten auction lots were Impressionist works. The combined value of fine art sold above $10 million grew 30%. The entire uplift in public auction sales, up 9% year-on-year, was concentrated in the second half of the year and driven substantially by a handful of trophy lots from major single-owner collections.

Strip those out and the recovery looks considerably thinner.

The dealer sector grew just 2%. Contemporary art was stagnant for the second consecutive year. Ultra-contemporary works, the artists who led the post-pandemic boom, declined 18% in value. Works created in the last 20 years now account for just 19% of the Postwar and Contemporary market, down from a peak of 34% in 2021. The rocket artists have landed and the descent has not stopped.

The market is still 9% below its 2023 level and below where it was a decade ago. The 4% recovery is welcome and real. It is not broad and it is not evenly distributed. It is a high-end recovery with a long tail of pressure underneath it.

What grew was old. Impressionist and Post-Impressionist sales up 47%. Old Masters up 30%. Modern art up 9%. The sectors that have been in relative decline for years came roaring back because collectors under uncertainty anchor on certainty, on artists whose markets are established, whose names are in the canon, whose work is not going to lose 40% of its value in a year because the Instagram algorithm shifted.

That is not pessimism. That is the market telling you something honest about where it currently trusts value to live. I wrote about exactly this dynamic in my piece “When Money Looks for Shelter” and was quietly delighted to find it echoed weeks later in The Gray Market’s observation that the art market looks better because everything else looks worse. If you want to understand the economics of that behavior, both pieces are worth reading together.

Two surveys. Same market. Two completely different stories.

This is the gap almost nobody is naming and it is the most important thing in both reports.

The collector survey, 3,100 high-net-worth individuals across 10 markets, shows a confident, diversified, active buyer. Allocations to art rose to an average of 20% of wealth, up from 15% in 2024. Average spending was $438,990 across an average of 14 works. Women outspent men by 46%, averaging $519,960 versus $357,000. Sixty-six percent were buying newly discovered artists. Eighty-four percent were optimistic about the market’s performance. Artist-direct sales doubled to 20% of total collector spending more than double the level reported the previous year. I wrote about this in depth when the collector report dropped in October 2025, that analysis is linked here.

The dealer survey shows something else entirely.

The average number of unique buyers per dealer dropped to 57, the lowest since 2021. For context: that number is below what Lion & Lamb regularly transacts in a single year. It is a striking figure to read from inside a practice that has been built around direct collector relationships precisely because the alternative looked like this.

The smallest dealers, those turning over under $250,000, lost 40% of their buyer base year-on-year. Operating costs rose 5% on average, above both the rate of inflation and aggregate sales growth for most businesses. Shipping and logistics costs were up 10%. Art fair costs up 9%. Travel and accommodation up 6%. Forty-five percent of dealers in the $250,000 to $500,000 turnover range reported declining margins despite rising sales meaning the cost of generating those sales exceeded the benefit. One third of all dealers overall reported lower profitability.

Two reports. Same market. Same year. Completely different experiences depending on which side of the table you sit on.

The collector is spending. The dealer is absorbing. The gap between those two realities is where the real market story lives in 2026 and it has been quietly widening for several years.

Who is buying

Seventy-four percent of active high-net-worth collectors are millennial or Gen Z. Let me say that again, 74%. The average collector age dropped to 38, down from 45 in the previous survey. These are not the collectors the art world was built for and they are not buying the way the art world was built to sell.

Collections are consolidating toward established artists. Works by established or top-tier artists now make up 45% of HNWI collections, up from just 25% in 2024. New and emerging artists dropped from 27% to 16%. This is not a market taking risks on the next big thing. This is a market that got burned on the next big thing and is now anchoring on durability.

Digital art is back with real numbers behind it. Fifty-one percent of high-net-worth collectors bought a digital artwork in 2024 or 2025. Digital art now accounts for 14% of fine art spending and 13% of works held in collections, up from just 3% in 2024. This is not NFT speculation. This is a genuine medium gaining legitimate ground in serious collections, led by Gen Z and female collectors.

Women are reshaping this market in ways that will compound over the next decade. Female collectors outspent men by 46% on average. Women allocated 47% of their spending to works by female artists versus 41% for men. Women are more likely to buy newly discovered artists, more likely to donate to museums, more likely to plan formally for their collections’ futures. Eighty percent of all HNWIs plan to pass their collections to their children. Most of those children will be younger, more diverse, and more digitally fluent than the collectors who built the collections they inherit.

The Great Wealth Transfer, an estimated $83 trillion moving between generations over the coming decades, is not a future story. It is happening right now in studios, galleries, auction houses, and estate plans across every major market. The collectors who receive that wealth will not buy the way their parents bought.

The Asian market is restructuring and nobody is saying it plainly

I have a Substack draft sitting unpublished that deals with exactly this, sourced from multiple conversations about galleries across the Asian market quietly restructuring their American artist rosters. This report confirms the structural conditions behind those conversations. What I did not anticipate was the timing. I spent an entire day on the phone with Asia on behalf of artists last week. This report dropped the following morning. Everything I had written privately in client emails the day before was in the data the next day. In all my years of reading this market, I have never had that experience.

Global art and antiques imports fell 14% in 2024 to $30.3 billion. Hong Kong imports declined 20%. Mainland China imports fell 40%. The more internationally focused auction houses in Hong Kong contracted while Mainland China’s more domestically focused houses picked up modestly, a 2% overall gain that obscures a significant bifurcation between what is happening inside China and what is happening at its international edges.

Meanwhile Singapore’s imports rose 74% and Japan’s doubled. That is not a footnote. For anyone who has worked in the Japanese market, this is significant news. I had a stint there in 2017 but the market wasn’t mature enough at the time to put down roots. To see this data now is genuinely exciting, Japan has quietly produced some of the most important artists of the last fifty years and a market finally catching up to that fact is worth watching closely.

The map is not disappearing. It is shifting. The galleries and artists watching where the capital is moving rather than mourning where it used to be will find real opportunity in that shift.

Tariffs are doing damage even where fine art is technically exempt. Fifty-six percent of dealers reported a negative impact on their business in 2025. Eighty percent of mid-tier auction houses said the same. The impacts are not primarily from direct duties on artwork, most fine art remains exempt, but from the cascade of indirect costs: shipping up, insurance up, administrative burden up, buyer confidence down.

Several dealers reported that US buyers had become hesitant not because of the direct cost of tariffs but because of the uncertainty surrounding them. I am one of those dealers. Sales have been lost to that uncertainty this year not for lack of the tools to overcome it, but because uncertainty, as the report notes, cannot be quantified, managed, or insured against. That is what makes it more damaging than risk. You cannot price it. You cannot hedge it. You can only absorb it.

What you actually own when the market contracts

Collectors are buying direct. Artist-direct sales now account for 20% of total collector spending doubling in a single year. Forty-three percent of high-net-worth collectors bought directly from an artist’s studio. Thirty-seven percent commissioned works. Thirty-five percent purchased via Instagram links without ever viewing the work in person.

Dealers are losing buyers. Galleries are restructuring. The institutions that built their value around being the necessary intermediary between artist and collector are watching that necessity erode in real time.

This did not happen because collectors stopped valuing curation or expertise or the experience of the gallery. It happened because artists built direct relationships, owned channels, and pricing structures that didn’t depend on an institution to hold. The collectors who found those artists directly found something the traditional gallery model cannot fully replicate a relationship with a person rather than a transaction with an entity.

What most artists own at this moment is either a direct collector relationship or a dependency. The ones with the relationship are calm. The ones with the dependency are watching rosters get restructured and waiting for emails that don’t come back.

This is structural. It does not reverse when the market recovers. It compounds.

My 2026 predictions and how they’re landing

In January I published a set of predictions built around one central argument: that world-building would outperform content, that coherence would outperform volume, and that the creators who built direct relationships and owned channels would compound while those who built inside institutions would find themselves exposed when those institutions moved first.

This data confirms most of it.

World-building over content – artist-direct sales doubling to 20% of collector spending is the market voting with real money for direct relationship and coherence over institutional gatekeeping. The artists who built audiences that belong to them are the ones converting. The ones who built followings inside gallery systems are the ones whose access is being restructured.

The emotional economy – confirmed throughout the collector motivations data. Art as identity, art as wellbeing, art as meaning rather than asset. The numbers behind it are growing year on year.

Fewer worlds, deeper engagement – confirmed. Collectors are consolidating. Selling intentions dropped from 55% to 25%. People are holding what they have, inheriting what their families built, and buying selectively rather than broadly. The casual collector is thinning out. The committed collector is deepening.

Digital art resurgence – confirmed with real numbers. Back to 13% of collections after falling to 3%. Not speculation. Participation.

What I did not see coming at the magnitude it arrived: the Impressionist and Old Masters surge. A 47% increase in Impressionist values is not a blip. Six of the top ten auction lots of the year were from that sector. I predicted collectors would anchor on durability. I did not predict they would go that far back that fast. The logic was right. The magnitude wasn’t.

What I would add now: the dealer squeeze is the defining market story of 2026. Not the headline number. Not the trophy lots. The gap between what collectors are spending and what dealers are absorbing is where the real pressure is building, operating costs above sales growth, buyer numbers falling, margins compressing in the middle of the market. That is a structural problem that a good November auction season does not solve.

What to do with the number

The market is back if you are at the very top of it. If you sold a Klimt or a Rothko in November, 2025 was an excellent year. If you run a gallery turning over $250,000 to $500,000 and watched your costs rise faster than your sales while losing 40% of your buyer base, 2025 was a year you survived, not a year you celebrated.

The $59.6 billion is real. The 4% is real. And the distribution of that growth, concentrated at the highest price points, in the oldest sectors, driven by a handful of single-owner collection sales in a single week in November, tells a story about where value is consolidating that every working artist, emerging gallery, and mid-market dealer needs to understand before they take a green slide at face value.

The coaching and mentorship market that has proliferated around artists is mostly noise. The underlying need it responds to is real, and this report makes that explicit. Artists need someone who can build the infrastructure with them: direct collector relationships, owned channels, pricing architecture, market positioning. The market is now explicitly rewarding those outcomes.

The report also shows that galleries without physical premises are up 14% year-on-year, the fastest growing segment of dealer structure. Fourteen percent of dealers now operate with no gallery space at all, double the share from a year ago. Mitchell-Innes & Nash is specifically named in the report as an example. This is not fringe behavior. This is a structural shift in how serious dealers are choosing to operate and it validates an architecture I have been building for six years before the data caught up to it.

The artists who are calm right now built or are building direct collector relationships that live in their own systems. The galleries that are calm built programs that don’t depend on the high end to subsidize the middle. The collectors who are calm bought what they believed in rather than what was being sold to them as the next thing.

I have been in this market a long time. I have been making a specific argument about how it was going to move – about transparency, about artist ownership, about direct relationships, about the infrastructure that actually protects a practice when institutions restructure. Reading this data was the first time I felt that argument fully confirmed in a single document. It was not a quiet satisfaction. It was genuinely thrilling.

The numbers that are disorienting to some are clarifying to me. If you worked in the arts before 2020 you know what the room looked like, who was in it, who was running it, and who was quietly told the market wasn’t ready for them. Women-owned galleries were rare. Women artists were chronically underserved. And that is before we get to the systematic exclusion of POC and queer artists, which is a Substack of its own, one I will write, because it deserves the full treatment, not a paragraph. I came up through women and gender studies and that lens has never left how I read this market or who I have chosen to work with. For a long time, holding the positions I held meant cheering people on quietly while operating inside the very structures that excluded them. It was, at times, a lonely place to do that work.

That is changing. More of my peers are in the room than ever before. Women artists and collectors, a primary part of my practice and something I care about deeply, are not just participating, they are leading. Digital art is being taken seriously on its own terms, opening the arena to talented people who have never had access before. New gallery models based on collaboration and hybrid practices are growing. Artists are building practices that are no longer determined by geography or by whichever trend they happened to be adjacent to at the right moment. Tech and art are converging in ways that feel genuinely generative, not the dystopian displacement we are watching play out elsewhere, but a real expansion of who gets to participate and how.

The market is telling everyone the same thing right now. The question is whether you trust the signal enough to act on it before the transition is forced on you. I am choosing to act on it.

Lion & Lamb launches the gallery formally soon – a hybrid platform built for exactly this. I cannot wait. After building galleries for other people for most of my career, this one is just mine.

Thank you for reading. If this piece resonated and you are an artist trying to build the infrastructure described here, the mentorship program is currently open reach out at info@lionandlamb.art

If you are a collector or industry professional interested in the gallery, the salon is the place to start. Sign up here.

See you Friday!

xoxo
-Rachael