Two forces are reshaping the art market: the largest generational wealth transfer in history and the digital infrastructure now underpinning how art is discovered, valued, and owned. As Art Basel 2025 opens today, this convergence is creating new rules for collectors and artists alike.
From Antique Fairs to Algorithm Feeds
I learned about buying and selling from my father, an antique dealer in northwest England. My weekends were spent at local antique fairs, watching him assess Georgian silver and Edwardian furniture, understanding value through touch, provenance, and intuition. In 2004, as a university student, I spent ÂŁ179 of my student loan on a piece by a relatively unknown street artist called Banksy. My friends thought I was completely crazy. That piece still hangs in my living room, and the ÂŁ179 investment has, shall we say, paid for itself.
That purchase represented something different from my father’s world: art bought on cultural instinct rather than traditional provenance, valued by emerging reputation rather than established history. Twenty years later, as digital discovery and online purchasing have become standard, that instinct-driven approach has evolved into something far more sophisticated—and far more connected.
The Numbers Tell the Story
The 2025 Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report reveals the scale of this transformation. Online art sales hit $10.5 billion in 2024—down from pandemic highs but still 76% above 2019 levels. More telling: nearly half of new collectors now make their first purchases online. Discovery happens on Instagram. Authentication begins with a digital certificate. The “phygital” collector journey—digital entry, physical verification, hybrid ownership—is now standard practice.
The most significant change I observed from the report launch: spontaneous art purchases have plummeted from 10% to just 1% of transactions. Ulrike Hoffmann-Buchardi from UBS highlighted something profound—collecting is becoming more collaborative, analytical, and family-inclusive. Women are playing greater roles in both decision-making and artist selection. The impulse buy is dying, replaced by research-driven, values-led investment.
These changes go beyond buyer behaviour—they’re reshaping the fundamental architecture of how the art world operates.
Infrastructure Over Intuition
The art market is being replatformed by two converging forces: metadata and money. Digital provenance systems and generational capital are creating new rules for how art is valued, owned, and transferred.
After the NFT frenzy subsided, blockchain’s role quietly matured from speculation to utility. Digital provenance systems now provide tamper-proof certificates, enforce resale rights, and record digital fingerprints of physical works. Think less about art on the blockchain, and more about the blockchain beneath the art.
Tokenization is gaining traction not just for buying art, but for fractionalising it. This lowers entry thresholds and opens new models for asset-backed investing. Traditional players like Swiss bank Syz are already participating, partnering with Taurus for art tokenization and trading.
The New Collector Archetype
Millennials and Gen Z aren’t just buying different art—they’re collecting differently. They favour global, digital-first artists. They prioritise purpose over prestige. Many discovered their first piece on Instagram, bought it via an app, and insured it through a smart contract.
This generation is more likely to join a collective like ConstitutionDAO—which raised $47 million from 17,000+ contributors to bid on a rare copy of the US Constitution at Sotheby’s—than walk into a Basel preview with a cheque. They see art as cultural currency and legacy planning simultaneously. They’re building collections that speak to identity, not just asset allocation.
Art is no longer a velvet-rope asset. It’s an API for personal and generational expression.
Women Leading the Shift
A parallel transformation is happening in who collects, not just how. Women now lead a growing share of family offices and private collections. Their approach often blends rigorous research, purpose-led investment, and long-term stewardship.
This shift manifests in collections increasingly focused on female artists, underrepresented voices, and social impact themes—strategic legacies rather than conventional prestige plays. Digital tools enable this: price transparency, online curation, direct artist connections. What used to be driven by prestige is increasingly guided by principles.
The Medium That Survived the Crash
Yes, the NFT market collapsed—from $2.9B in 2021 to $23M in Q1 2025. But the medium persisted. Generative artists, video creators, digital photographers didn’t disappear when floor prices dropped. They continued to mint, exhibit, and sell. Institutional collections now include NFTs. Museums accept them as donations.
The infrastructure story is more complex. Companies like Arcual continue to provide blockchain-based certificates for physical artworks, but others haven’t survived the transition from hype to utility. Fairchain, which offered digital certificates and artist royalty enforcement, announced its closure in August 2025, citing the gap between vision and “market readiness.” Their farewell message was telling: “We believe that a digital standard for ownership of physical art and collectibles is inevitable. Artist royalties, however, are by no means guaranteed.”
This captures the current moment perfectly—the vision is sound, but the timing and adoption curves remain challenging. The real legacy of NFTs lies in the architecture they required: metadata standards, storage protocols, digital permanence. Fully on-chain art, IPFS hashes, smart contract-enforced royalties—these building blocks have outlived both the hype and some of the early companies.
The tourists left. The infrastructure remained, though not all of it survived.
Preserving Passion in a Platform World
I worry that as collecting becomes more analytical and infrastructure-driven, do we risk losing the passion that makes art meaningful? That ÂŁ179 Banksy purchase wasn’t strategic—it was intuitive, emotional, slightly reckless. It connected me to something I couldn’t quite articulate then, but understand now as the foundation of meaningful collecting.
The future art market will be built on infrastructure—platforms, protocols, provenance chains. But infrastructure should amplify passion, not replace it. The best collecting still starts with falling in love with a piece. The difference now is that love can be supported by data, verified by blockchain, and shared through digital communities.
Art as Programmable Legacy
As Art Basel 2025 opens, we’re witnessing the combination of digital fluency and generational capital rewriting the rules. Wealth is being transferred—and with it, a new mandate for access, transparency, and meaning.
Art is evolving from a store of value to a programmemable asset—with metadata that matters and smart contracts that outlive their creators. If the 20th century taught us to treat art as investment, the 21st is teaching us to treat it as infrastructure—personal, cultural, and increasingly programmable.
The art world isn’t being disrupted. It’s being replatformed. And that platform is being built by a generation that learned to love art online but still wants to hang it on their living room wall.
The question isn’t whether this transformation will continue—it’s whether we can build infrastructure that serves passion rather than replacing it.