wonder over returns: how arT gets its soul back
“Over the last few decades art collectors bought into a market, not a vision. They collected momentum, not meaning. Now, the focus is shifting back to magic and wonder.” — Steven Alderton
The art market is having a reckoning. Global art auction sales in 2024 were down 34% to AU$14.85 billion (Hurun Global Art List 2025). Fine art auction sales contracted 10% year on year in the first half of 2025 (Bank of America Fall 2025 Art Market Update), marking the third consecutive first half decline. This followed a 12% drop in global sales in 2024 to AU$86.25 billion (Art Basel & UBS Global Art Market Report 2025). Yet the story isn't simply one of contraction, while sales of works over AU$15 million plummeted 39%, the global sub-AU$15 million segment rose 17%. The primary market showed similar divergence: smaller global galleries with annual sales under AU$375,000 saw sales increase 17% in 2024, while galleries with turnover above AU$15 million contracted 9% (Art Basel & UBS). Gallery sales overall fell just 6%, dramatically outperforming the 25% collapse in public auction sales. More importantly, transaction volume rose 3% in 2024, with 2025 seeing the second highest number of lots sold since 2016, suggesting the market isn't dying, it's being reborn at a more sustainable, accessible scale where people are buying for connection, not speculation.
Cultural strategist and former Art Basel director Mark Spiegler recently declared on The Art Angle podcast: "We need to stop hyping art as an investment, it's not a great investment unless you're an insider, and positioning art as investment has scared away potentially great collectors who thought they were getting into a discussion about culture and suddenly found themselves at dinner tables hearing about 2-3x flips." This isn't just market commentary. It's the core diagnosis of what went wrong.
The Investment Narrative That Broke Everything
For two decades, the art world sold itself as an asset class. Galleries whispered about artists "going to the next level”. Auction houses published investment indices. Advisors pitched art funds. We built an entire apparatus to convince interested people that buying art was a smart financial strategy.
I watched this unfold from inside major institutions, and then from private practice. What was once considered gauche; asking about an artwork's investment potential before discussing what it actually means, became not just acceptable but expected. The fundamental question shifted from "does this move me?" to "will this appreciate?"
The result was predictable. A speculative bubble that trained artists to find repeatable formulas, collectors to flip emerging work, and galleries to chase market heat rather than artistic vision. When that bubble collapsed, we were left with a wreckage: closed galleries, disillusioned collectors, and a generation of artists who'd learned the wrong lessons about what their practice should be.
But something deeper was lost. Many collectors now find their collections lack distinction. The speculation game didn’t just fail financially, it fostered a culture of sameness, where discovery was only an illusion.
The Generational Divide Nobody Wants to Acknowledge
Here's what actually happened over the past decade. The number of billionaires globally increased from 2,089 in 2015 to 3,442 in 2025, a 65% increase, while their combined wealth more than doubled, surging from AU$10 trillion to just under AU$25.5 trillion, a 154% increase (Hurun Global Rich List 2015, 2025). The luxury goods market exploded, growing from over AU$1.65 trillion in 2015 to AU$2.38 trillion in 2025, a 44% increase (Bain & Company Luxury Study 2015, 2025). And the art market? It declined 12% in 2024 to AU$86.25 billion (Art Basel & UBS Global Art Market Report 2025). When you inflation-adjust that figure over the past 15 years, the picture becomes even starker: not a market going up and down, but a market actually declining. The highs are lower. The valleys are lower. As Rupert Hoogewerf of Hurun Report notes, "the number of billionaires in the world has never been higher, hitting a record 3,400. So there's more than enough wealth around to continue collecting" (Hurun Global Art List 2025). Yet HNW collectors allocated an average of 20% of their wealth to art in 2025, up from 15% in 2024 (Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025); interestingly, individual allocations are rising even as the overall market contracts.
Younger collectors aren’t buying art the way their parents did. Many are discovering art on Instagram instead of in galleries, with over half having purchased work from artists they found online. Rather than focusing on investment or traditional validation, they’re guided by personal connection and what resonates with them in the digital realm.
We've done a most ordinary job of growing art market share while wealth has grown exponentially for a few. Galleries became so focused on serving their existing collector base and chasing speculation that they forgot how to welcome new people in. The traditional model of opaque pricing, insider relationships, gatekeeping through intimidation — actively repels the very people who have means and interest to collect.
This isn't just a shift in the purchasing channel. It's a complete reimagining of what confers value and credibility in art.
According to Artsy's 2024 Collector Insights Report, "Millennials now make up 52% of collectors using the platform, with 73% citing emotional connection or personal resonance as the primary reason for purchase." One Los Angeles-based advisor noted: "My clients in their 30’s don't ask, 'What's the resale value?' They ask, 'What does the artist stand for?’”.
Instead of accumulating objects, this new generation invests in experiences and ideas — retreats, festivals, and supporting artistic risk-taking. With so many options for meaningful experiences, art must offer something uniquely transformative to earn a place in people’s lives. Art isn’t just another fleeting experience; it’s an ongoing presence. Unlike a short-lived event, the right artwork can reshape your daily environment and perspective for years.
People want ongoing cultural participation; objects and experiences that reflect their values and worldview. The challenge is to make art accessible and engaging, so it becomes their obvious choice, not an exclusive insider game. If art remains positioned as mere trophy ownership, we risk losing a whole new generation of collectors.
What Art Actually Offers (And What We've Forgotten to Say)
The path forward isn't more sophisticated financial engineering. It's creating new front doors into art; ways for people to engage that feel meaningful from the first moment. Not opaque and intimidating.
Consider Robert and Ethel Scull, who began collecting in the mid-1950s when there was virtually no market for contemporary American art. They were singularly devoted to Jasper Johns and over time acquired 22 major works, commissioned Warhol's first portrait, acquired Rosenquist's epochal F-III (guaranteeing that the monumental, multi-canvas painting would not be broken up and sold piecemeal), and collected Lee Bontecou's pioneering sculptural work. Or Herb and Lenore Schorr, who started in the '70's and were well known as early adopters of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Lenore said of seeing Basquiat's work for the first time: "I could see de Kooning, Rauschenberg and Twombly...Everything that we had learned was there. And he had his own message. It was his life in New York, as a young black man. I thought it was pure magic". Neither the Sculls nor the Schorrs were handed laundry lists of must-have artists to fill their portfolios. They weren't told who to collect to demonstrate savvy art investing. They bought work that moved them viscerally, that demanded their attention, that they urgently needed to live with. And it turned out they were collecting the artists who would define postwar and contemporary art. The authentic is real. True artists reveal themselves through work that transforms how we see. That sensation, the urgent admiration we feel when encountering something genuine, remains the most reliable compass for collecting. When we shift back to that principle, when we return to acquiring art because it makes a difference in our lives rather than our portfolios, we reconnect with the true power of art.
Art is about transformation and cultural enrichment. It's about discovery, ideas that challenge how you see the world, the joy of encountering something that stops us in our tracks. It has to be fun. It has to offer great connections — and great parties. When artists are working at their best, they're offering us new ways of seeing, thinking, and experiencing. That's not an investment thesis. That's transformation.
Living with art authentically creates a unique intersection of collection, space, and identity. The work speaks to your daily experience, reshaping your environment in personal ways. This is about genuine cultural resonance, not market status.
Where The Magic Lives
The decompressed market, the collapsed speculation, the slower art fair calendar, all of this creates space for something different. Artists can take creative risks again. Not safe, repeatable work designed for market consistency, but bold, experimental, boundary-pushing practice. Work that's multi-sensorial, immersive, challenging. Work that engages with ideas, not just aesthetics. Work that offers critique alongside beauty, provocation alongside craft.
This is where the magic lives, in artists doing real work with deep thinking, creating experiences and objects that lead us into universes we couldn't access otherwise. Not content optimised for Instagram engagement metrics, but genuine artistic investigation that might be atmospheric, relational, even difficult. Art that demands something from us beyond a financial transaction.
The new generation of collectors seems to understand this instinctively. They're not asking "what's the resale value?" They're asking "what does this artist stand for?" They want to support practices, not just acquire products. They're interested in commissioning work, visiting studios, understanding process. Direct engagement with artists and ideas, not mediated relationships through traditional gatekeeping structures.
The opportunity isn't to recreate the speculation bubble with better marketing. It's to build genuine pathways between people who care about culture and the artists creating meaningful work. Make the engagement transparent, accessible, idea-driven from the start. Focus on enlightenment and discovery rather than investment returns. Create communities around shared cultural curiosity rather than competitive acquisition.
Art can be magical again. But only if we remember what made it magical in the first place: artists challenging us to see differently, collectors engaging because they're genuinely moved, and all of us participating in culture because it enriches how we live, not because we're building portfolios.
Contemporary collectors are, according to Bank of America's Fall 2025 Art Market Update, "reevaluating their priorities, favouring engagement with working artists over secondary market transactions." They're "increasingly interested in how they can interact with and support artists directly, whether through artist grantmaking organisations or other means.
Art That Transforms Your Daily Lives
For collectors who want to own work, the magic model changes everything. You're not asking: "Will this artist go to the next level?" You're asking: "Does this work transform my experience? Does it create daily wonder? Does it reflect who I am culturally? Does it belong in my life?"
This is fundamentally about returning to what drew people to art in the first place: the capacity to be genuinely moved. Collectors are looking for work that creates emotional resonance in their daily lives, things they want to wake up to, that shift their mood when they enter a room, that become part of their home landscape in ways that feel essential rather than decorative. They want art that sparks conversation, that guests notice and ask about, that becomes woven into the narrative of how they live.
The wonder isn't abstract. It's specific and personal. It's work that articulates something about our shared world; the environment we're navigating, the relationships that shape us, the social fabric we're part of. The artwork that captures something about contemporary experience you felt but couldn't name. The work that makes visible the invisible structures of how we live now. Art that holds meaning about our collective moment, not just aesthetic appeal.
This approach requires patience and genuine engagement. It means visiting studios, understanding an artist's practice over time, commissioning work that responds to specific spaces or ideas. It means building relationships with artists and art institutions with guidance from independent art advisors based on shared cultural curiosity rather than transactional acquisition. The collectors who embrace this model aren't chasing market heat, they're building collections that genuinely reflect who they are, what they care about, and how they want to experience their lives.
The art world can be magical again. The path forward isn't through more sophisticated financial instruments or market optimisation. It's through returning to wonder.
Steven Alderton is an art advisor and buyer’s agent working with collectors and art lovers to inform how art shapes their lives. He is also the Head of Art & Philanthropy at Hurun Australasia.