Auctioneer Victoire Gineste gestures as she adjudicates for 20 million euros ($21.9 million) a recently rediscovered drawing by Michelangelo, the artist’s first known nude, at the Christie’s auction house in Paris on May 18, 2022.
Emmanuel Dunand | Afp | Getty Images
Wealthy, young collectors in Asia have been fueling demand for art — particularly via online channels — and have emerged as a key clientele for international auction houses.
Despite being relatively new to the market, Gen Zers, those aged between 12 and 27, and millennials — 28 to 43 years old — have sharply increased their spending on art purchases.
The median expenditure on art and antiques by high-net-worth millennials in Asia was $59,785, while for Gen Zers it was $56,000 during the first half of 2023, compared with $61,820 and $65,000, respectively, for the entire 2022, according to the Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2023.
“Asia is a key driver of millennial buying at Christie’s globally,” Christie’s said.
Mainland China was the top contributing region by value for millennials, followed by Hong Kong and Singapore at Christie’s Hong Kong 2023 Autumn Auctions, a spokesperson told CNBC.
In Asia, collectors from China had the highest median expenditure of $241,000 in the first half of 2023, followed by Singapore at $38,000 and Taiwan at $31,000 — with Chinese patrons also being the largest spenders globally, the report showed.
Top-tier international auction houses Sotheby’s and Phillips have also reported a surge in purchases by young Asian collectors in recent years.
In the first half of 2023, millennials made up almost 40% of Christie’s buyers in Asia Pacific, and 20% in the Americas, Europe and the Middle East, according to the spokesperson. A report from the auction house showed a 65% increase in new Gen Z buyers in 2023.
Millennials accounted for nearly a third of the global buyers and 40% of Asian buyers at Phillips in 2022, its latest annual report showed.
Sotheby’s 2023 report stated that bidding activity of younger collectors grew to 30% in the first half of 2023 from 6% in 2018. Millennials and Gen X — aged 44 to 59 — are classified as “younger collectors” by the auction house.
While there was “significant activity from millennials across Asia,” “flourishing contributions” from Taiwan and South Korea stood out in 2023, the Christie’s representative highlighted.
What are they collecting?
Younger buyers have a different eye for art and their purchases contrast with the preferences of older generations.
Last year, millennials spent the most on sculptures, installations, photography and film or video art, while Gen Zers favored digital art and prints, the report by Art Basel & UBS stated.
“Millennial collectors are drawn to figurative work … there is also a demand among young buyers for surrealist landscapes that portray spiritual spaces,” Erin Remington, director of sales and curation at Saatchi Art, an online art gallery and marketplace, told CNBC.
As many as 64% of the younger buyers — aged 18 to 36 — feel that it is important to have emerging artists in their collection, compared with just 43% of the older buyers, Artsy, an online art brokerage told CNBC.
For the younger collectors, purchasing from blue-chip artists — those who are well-known in the industry — is not a priority. Only 11% of the younger collectors consider it important to collect blue-chip art, compared with 23% of the older buyers, Artsy’s 2023 Art Collector Insights showed.
In Asia, millennial buyers are collecting both contemporary and classical Asian Art, “reflecting a desire to connect with their roots and culture,” the representative at Christie’s said.
At Christie’s 2023 Hong Kong Autumn Auctions, 40% of the new buyers who purchased Chinese ceramics, paintings and works of art were millennials, Christie’s told CNBC.
Online art auctions
While physical auction numbers have mostly returned to the pre-pandemic levels, online art sales are here to stay.
The size of the online art market is expected to grow to $17.76 billion by 2030 from $9.72 billion last year, according to a report by Grand View Research.
The number of online art auctions also rose in 2023 as high-net-worth collectors — individuals with at least $1 million in liquid financial assets — became more selective about physical art events, and most reduced visits to live auctions, the report by Art Basel & UBS showed.
Post pandemic, the art world saw a “massive shift into digital,” Francis Belin, president of Asia Pacific at Christie’s told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia.”
In the first half of 2023, 80% of the bids across auctions at Christie’s were placed online compared with pre-pandemic levels of 45% in 2019, Christie’s said.
The pandemic has “brought digital very much at the forefront in what we do, which is presenting arts and supporting transactions … a lot of collectors now are being very comfortable (with online auctions) bidding up to 40 million Hong Kong dollars ($5.12 million),” Belin said.
Gen Z collectors often purchase art from listings online and have favored handbags, watches and prints — artworks created by applying ink on engraved wood or stone and pressed onto paper — according to the report by Christie’s.
Auction houses are stepping up investments in digital spaces to entice younger buyers who are “more digitally savvy and globally connected,” Christie’s said.
It continues to extend its digital reach through livestream auctions and online bids on social media platform WeChat. The auction house’s livestreams hit a record high of 60 million views in 2023, the representative highlighted.
“We have increasingly millennials and younger collectors buying at Christie’s [and] starting to collect … that we’ve been able to also engage much more with all our digital innovations,” Belin added.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
