The Diagnosis Is In. Where Is the Architecture?

Georgina Adam has spent three decades watching the art market with the kind of sustained, unsentimental attention that the market itself has rarely turned on its own structural failures. Her latest book, NextGen Collectors and the Art Market, published this month in the Lund Humphries and Sotheby's Institute "Hot Topics in the Art World" series, delivers exactly what we have come to expect from her: a meticulous, well-sourced, and sobering diagnostic of an industry that knows it is losing the next generation of collectors but cannot seem to stop repeating the behaviors that drive them away. The book is essential reading. And yet, its most revealing quality may be not what it says, but what it cannot point to.

Adam's central argument is by now familiar to anyone paying attention: the art trade faces what she calls an existential crisis of relevance among millennial and Gen Z buyers. Christie's reported that a third of its buyers in the first half of 2025 were under 45, a figure that sounds encouraging until one considers what Christie's former CEO Guillaume Cerutti told Adam; that these younger collectors are "volatile," less predictable, less loyal, and harder to track. They are participating in the market. They are not, however, participating in the market as the market would like them to. It is no coincidence, then, that Adam devotes her penultimate chapter to cataloguing the specific grievances this cohort holds against the industry's operating assumptions, and that the single grievance she returns to most forcefully is price opacity. Younger buyers suspect, correctly in many cases, that dealers manipulate the market through undisclosed inventory, hidden sales history, and selective discounting. Put another way: they have looked behind the velvet rope and found the plumbing untrustworthy.

This is not a minor complaint. It is a structural indictment. The art market has historically relied on information asymmetry as a feature, not a bug; the opacity of pricing, the gatekeeping of access, the cultivation of mystique around who gets to buy what and at what price. For a generation that grew up with transparent pricing on every platform from Uber to StockX, this is not charm. It is friction. And friction, in digital commerce, is synonymous with abandonment.

Adam is equally sharp on the question of institutional authority, or rather its collapse. She notes that younger collectors have "minimal loyalty to institutions, which they see as having outdated values and principles." The old constellation of taste-making authorities; museum curators, established critics, blue-chip galleries with waiting lists; has been disintermediated by peer networks, social media, and independent research. More than half of high-net-worth collectors surveyed in the 2025 UBS/Art Basel report purchased at least one artwork via Instagram or other social platforms without viewing it in person. The discovery mechanism has migrated entirely to digital infrastructure. The conversion mechanism, by and large, has not followed.

What Adam also documents, with characteristic precision, is the values shift that accompanies this generational transition. NextGen collectors are two-and-a-half times more likely than their parents to prioritize climate change as a top concern; gender equality, racial tolerance, and questions of identity are not peripheral interests but core motivations that shape acquisition decisions. The idea that collecting is an extension of personal ethics rather than a performance of connoisseurial prowess represents a fundamental reorientation of what it means to own art. For this cohort, buying a work by an emerging woman artist from the African diaspora is not a charitable gesture or a trend-following exercise. It is an act of alignment between capital and conviction. The market has been slow to recognize this because it has been slow to build infrastructure that makes such alignment legible, searchable, and trustworthy.

And here we arrive at the book's most instructive limitation. As the Artnet review published the day after the book's release observed, Adam "makes only cursory attempts to look at this status quo's 'disruptors'" and the reviewer wished for "more space dedicated to thoughtful analysis of digitally native platforms that have attempted to provide immediacy and transparency in the art market." This is not a criticism of Adam's scholarship, which is thorough and well-reasoned. It is an observation about the state of the field she is describing. The gap exists in the book because it exists in reality. The infrastructure that would answer the problems Adam diagnoses; a platform that combines transparent pricing with editorial depth, that empowers taste-makers with real economic incentives rather than institutional credentials, that treats provenance not as an afterthought but as an architectural primitive; has been, until very recently, more aspiration than artifact.

We should be honest about the scale of what is at stake. Adam cites the frequently invoked figure of $84 trillion in intergenerational wealth transfer over the next two decades, and the Apollo Magazine profile of her book added the important caveat that this transfer will be slow, spanning 20 to 25 years, with significant sums flowing sideways to spouses before reaching the next generation. The question, as Adam herself told Apollo, is whether those inheritors "will use the money to buy art or something else entirely." The answer will depend less on taste and more on trust. If the art market's infrastructure remains opaque, exclusionary, and resistant to the digital-native expectations of its incoming collector base, the money will go elsewhere. Not because these buyers lack interest in art, but because the market's operating system was built for a world that no longer exists.

The work ahead is not primarily curatorial or aesthetic. It is architectural. The next generation of collectors does not need to be convinced that art matters. They need to be shown that the market can be trusted. That prices are real. That provenance is verifiable. That the people recommending work to them have both expertise and accountability. That the act of collecting can be an informed, transparent, and values-aligned practice rather than an exercise in navigating deliberately constructed opacity. Adam's book makes the case, comprehensively and persuasively, that the old architecture has failed. What remains is to build the new one.