Auction houses are said to have learned how to speak to a modern audience. Perhaps the more interesting question is what that actually means.
There is an interesting story developing around the next generation of art collectors. Millennials and Gen Z are becoming increasingly important to the major auction houses. At Christie’s, they accounted for 33% of clients in 2025, while 47% of new clients in the first half of 2026 were Millennial or Gen Z.
It makes for an appealing narrative. Younger collectors are behaving differently, auction houses have worked out how to reach them and galleries, with their opaque pricing and traditional ways of doing business, risk being left behind.
There is some truth in that. The problem comes when several interesting trends are bundled together to reach a convenient conclusion.
Take Christie’s recent marketing of Constantin Brâncuși’s Danaïde. Ahead of its May auction, Christie’s produced a beautifully shot film featuring Nicole Kidman with the sculpture, accompanied by David Bowie’s Golden Years. The work went on to sell for $107.6 million, setting a new auction record for the artist.
It is difficult to imagine a more polished example of an auction house “speaking to a modern audience”. Art history meets Hollywood, Bowie and luxury-brand storytelling. The traditional catalogue essay hasn’t disappeared, but it now sits alongside content designed to travel far beyond the established collecting world.
Clever? Absolutely.
Evidence that auction houses have cracked the next generation of art buyers? That is a bigger leap.
A $107.6 million Brâncuși exists in a rather different universe from the part of the art market where most people actually participate. For collectors buying works for $2,000, $10,000 or $30,000, Nicole Kidman is unlikely to be the missing ingredient.
What today’s collectors want may be considerably less complicated.
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The Other Art Market
The art market has always had a fascination with its biggest numbers. Record-breaking works make headlines, but they can distort our understanding of what is happening beneath them.
Research published in 2026 by Affordable Art Fair and ArtTactic deliberately turned its attention to the market below US$50,000, describing it as one of the most active and resilient parts of the global art market. It is also where many people begin collecting. Significantly, half of the galleries surveyed reported an increase in younger buyers.
That sits somewhat awkwardly with the suggestion that a new generation is simply bypassing galleries for auctions.
Younger collectors are certainly buying at auction, but they are also buying through galleries, art fairs and online. Increasingly, those channels overlap. Someone might discover an artist on social media, research them online, visit an art fair, speak to a gallery and eventually buy the work through a website.
The interesting change, then, isn’t necessarily where people are buying art, but what they expect from the experience when they get there. And this is where galleries should pay attention.
The Price of Opacity
Artsy’s Art Market Trends 2025 found that 69% of collectors had hesitated to buy art because of a lack of transparency around pricing, provenance or other information. Only 5% regarded the art market as completely transparent, while 60% said greater price transparency would make collecting easier.
There is an uncomfortable statistic for galleries buried in the same research. On Artsy, works displaying a visible price were around six times more likely to sell than those without one.
None of this should be particularly surprising.
For decades, opacity has been part of the theatre of the art market. “Price on request” could imply exclusivity. Information was controlled and access to certain works often depended upon relationships. For some collectors, navigating that world was part of the experience.
The problem is that the rest of the world changed.
Someone considering a $10,000 artwork can now research an artist, compare works internationally, look at previous auction results, investigate editions and provenance and learn an extraordinary amount before ever speaking to a gallery. Against that backdrop, refusing to display a price doesn’t recreate the old information imbalance. It simply gives the collector another hurdle to clear.
That doesn’t mean every gallery transaction can or should operate like conventional retail. Artworks are not interchangeable products, consignments can involve different commercial arrangements and some transactions genuinely require a conversation. But there is a considerable difference between complexity where complexity is necessary and opacity simply because that is how the art market has always operated.
Auctions Don’t Own Transparency
Auction houses undoubtedly have an advantage when it comes to perceived transparency. The estimate is published, bidding is visible and eventually the hammer falls. Everybody can see what happened.
Except, of course, it is not quite that simple.
The hammer price isn’t necessarily what the buyer pays once buyer’s premium and taxes are included. Guarantees and irrevocable bids can influence major sales, while estimates themselves form part of the commercial process of attracting both consignors and bidders. An auction result is useful market evidence, but it isn’t an objective declaration of an artwork’s value. It tells us what somebody was prepared to pay, in a particular room or online, on a particular day.
None of that diminishes the auction model. It simply means galleries shouldn’t concede the transparency argument as though auctions somehow own it.
A gallery can publish the price. It can provide the medium, dimensions, edition, provenance and condition. It can explain what accompanies the work, where it is located and what is involved in getting it onto the collector’s wall.
Then it can offer something an auction house often cannot: time to consider the work, ask questions, understand the artist and decide whether you actually want to live with the artwork rather than whether you can outbid the person sitting three rows ahead.
The answer isn’t for galleries to become auction houses. It is to stop treating basic information as privileged information.
Price, condition and context shouldn’t be difficult to find. They are part of making an informed decision.
What Does a Modern Collector Actually Want?
There is a tendency to talk about the “next generation collector” as though Millennials and Gen Z have arrived with an entirely new psychological relationship with art.
Maybe we are making this harder than it needs to be.
A collector discovering art today probably wants to know the price and understand what they are buying. They want decent images and enough information to make an informed decision. They may want to hear the artist talk about the work, understand the story behind it or simply learn more about the artist.
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They also expect to be able to do much of that whenever and wherever they happen to be looking.
None of this means they don’t value expertise. Quite the opposite. When virtually unlimited information is available online, knowing which information actually matters becomes more valuable, not less.
A good gallery can explain why one edition differs from another, put an artist’s work into context, discuss condition and provenance, and advise on framing and conservation. Algorithms are increasingly sophisticated at learning our tastes from what we search, view and buy. A good gallerist brings something different to that process: conversation, an understanding of why a collector responds to certain works and, sometimes, the confidence to suggest something completely unexpected.
That relationship still matters.
The Affordable Art Fair and ArtTactic research is interesting in this respect because it suggests that digital channels are increasingly acting as a bridge to physical purchasing and human relationships rather than simply replacing them.
Online and offline are not opposing sides of the market anymore. They are simply different parts of the same journey.
Accessibility Without The Dumb-Down
This brings us back to Christie’s, Nicole Kidman and Brâncuși.
What Christie’s did wasn’t really about changing the art. Danaïde remained Danaïde. The scholarship, provenance and art-historical importance were still there.
What changed was the doorway through which people were invited to encounter the work.
That is something galleries can learn from without requiring a Hollywood star or a David Bowie soundtrack.
An artist talking candidly about why they made something can provide that doorway. So can a short video, an unexpected piece of art history, a virtual exhibition, an interesting cultural reference or simply a well-written story that makes somebody curious enough to look again.
Accessibility doesn’t require dumbing art down. There is plenty of room between making something accessible and making people work unnecessarily hard to understand the art. Give people something worth knowing and enough substance to reward their curiosity.
Which brings us back to what “speaking to a modern audience” actually means.
It isn’t necessarily about speaking younger or putting celebrities beside expensive sculptures, but recognising that collectors now have different expectations of the businesses selling to them. They expect information to be available, galleries to function properly online and communication to sound human, without the layers of art-world formality.
The next generation of collectors may indeed change the art market, but not because their relationship with art is fundamentally different from the generations before them. People still discover things they love. They still become curious, learn, change their minds and occasionally encounter something they simply cannot stop thinking about.
What has changed is their tolerance for everything standing between that moment and a purchase.
In a world where information is everywhere, opacity doesn’t necessarily create mystique. More often, it creates friction. Good galleries still have something enormously valuable to offer in judgement, knowledge, curation, context and relationships.
Perhaps speaking to a modern audience isn’t about reinventing the gallery, but making what galleries do best easier to access.
Until the next one…
Ele & Blair xoxo