Believe in the age-gap art collector
Trends in music, movies, and more suggest that older art can be a bigger draw to younger buyers than a lot of people think.
John Chamberlain, Gondola Marianne Moore (1982). Courtesy Hauser & Wirth
It’s basically impossible to go online in May 2026 without encountering a heated discourse about age-gap relationships. Formerly known as May December romances (by people on the December side of the equation, I should say), consensual entanglements between people whose birthdates are a decade or more apart have been a thing for as long as humans have been keeping track.1 Sure, they piss off as many people as they draw in, but there’s no denying they’re an evergreen part of life on earth.
Yet when people in the art trade talk about how to attract newer (and especially younger) collectors, the default assumption tends to be that the key is offering them work by artists in their general age range. This, if you take even a half-step back from it, is kind of ridiculous. As age-gap relationships reinforce, birthdate proximity often has zero impact on who people fall in love (or get infatuated) with—and the same can be true for the types of objects they fixate on, too.
I’m dwelling on all this because one of the main takeaways from this month’s major New York auctions is that the offerings lean distinctly toward the past, from post-war art to early Modernism. Some insiders I’ve talked to worry that this historical bent could box out the younger generations of buyers that the market so desperately needs. After all, don’t they just want to collect artists of their generation?!
Although I don’t think getting younger people to buy older art is an uncontested layup, I do think it’s a lot more doable than many people have come to expect. The reason becomes clear if we look at age-gap momentum in other cultural sectors: frankly, it’s a lot more prevalent—and a lot more intense—than the conventional wisdom would lead you to believe.
The Gray Market is an independent, reader-funded project. Click the purple button to become a free subscriber—or upgrade to paid for The Gray Market Investigates, a monthly series of reports that began with AI’s use on the business side of art.
Asynchronous music
Let’s start by looking at what’s been happening to music consumption over the past several years. ICYMI, just about every credible data source you can find points to the same conclusion: the past is dominating the present.
To avoid dowsing us all in a flood of numbers that just circle around to the same point again and again like we’re trapped in a washing machine, I’m going to use the below chart from Statista as a microcosm. Using data on “album-equivalent consumption” from Luminate, a music analytics firm, and Billboard, it tracks the year-to-year performance between two broad categories: new music (meaning anything released in the preceding 18 months), and catalog music (meaning anything released further back than the preceding 18 months).2
Chart by Statista
The chart doesn’t just show that catalog tracks consistently trounced new ones every year from 2019 through 2023; it also shows that catalog’s lead on new music increased every 12 months over that span.
Just about every trustworthy study I’ve seen covering the years since reinforces that the basic relationship hasn’t changed in any meaningful way: older music still has newer music in a chokehold. For example, Midia, another music intelligence company, recently found that only a small fraction of survey respondents across age groups regularly listen to new music in the week surrounding its release. (Around 25% said they do this at least once a month.)
More important for our purposes, the younger the listeners in Midia’s study, the less said listeners cared about release schedules or chronology in general.
A lot of this stems from the ways that TikTok and algorithmic playlists (like Spotify’s RapCaviar or Discover Weekly) have upended music discovery. The strongest forces pushing people to songs or artists they didn’t know before are memes, influencers (including covert influence campaigns), and to a lesser extent, streaming-platform curation. The last of these has at least some allegiance to the here and now, but the first two have none whatsoever—and the evidence suggests they’re a lot more powerful.
Case in point: Were you up on the unlikely resurgence of Lady Gaga’s “Bloody Mary,” a non-single from 2011, after TikTokers decided to mass-sync it for a dance meme about the Netflix series Wednesday 11 years later? What about when Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” topped 1 billion streams 38 years on from its release because a remixed version appeared in a 2022 episode of Stranger Things? Or when “Dreams,” the feel-good 1977 Fleetwood Mac reverie, returned to the Billboard Hot 100 more than 40 years later, after it soundtracked a preternaturally laid-back skateboarding meme that gave listeners momentary relief from the fear that we were all going to die in isolation from a just-discovered, little-understood coronavirus?
Kicking free of the present is a habit that transcends music, though, especially when it comes to younger consumers. For proof, all we have to do is switch cultural sectors.
Geezers take Hollywood
In a repeat survey called Future of Film, the National Research Group, a major entertainment analytics company, polled a census-balanced sample of several thousand Americans between the ages of 12 and 74 on a number of questions about the trajectory of the movie industry. Best of all, though, NRG started breaking out its findings by generation early last year.
One prompt brought out an especially surprising set of answers from Gen Z respondents in the February 2025 edition of the survey: “Please list up to five actors or actresses that would make you most interested in seeing a new movie in a theater in the future.”
Below is the top 25. I went ahead and wrote out the ages of each star at the time of the survey, with those under age 40 in green and those aged 40 and up in red…3
The screaming scarlet takeaway from the survey is that the vast majority of the talent drawing Gen Z to theaters was much older than they were. A few data points emphasize the extent of the strangeness here…
Of the top 25 stars, 18—or 72%—were aged 40 or older.
The median age of the entire list was 50—old enough to get an AARP card.
Four of the top ten names were between the ages of 60 (Keanu Reeves, who ranked ninth) and 70 (Denzel Washington, who ranked eighth).
The only under-40 star to crack the top ten was Zendaya, who ranked seventh at age 28.
Now, Matthew Belloni of Puck rightly caveated the data last year by noting that recency bias tends to influence these surveys fairly strongly. So it’s possible that the release schedule in the year since has rebalanced the scales further toward young(er) stars in Gen Z’s eyes, and I just don’t know it because I don’t have access to any of NRG’s subsequent studies. At the same time, the results were so heavily weighted toward old(er) stars that it would be nearly impossible for the underlying dynamic to flip in the succeeding 12 months.4
As you probably guessed, the rankings only got grayer once the survey broadened out to include older age groups. “Only 14 actors ranked in the top 25 in all five surveys,” Belloni reported, referencing the February 2025 edition and four previous iterations. The median age of the “Elite 14” stars, as he called them, was 59. He added: “Nobody is under 45. Fully half are 60 or older.”
There’s a larger discussion to be had about the movie theater’s place in the cultural terrain of 2026 and beyond. But what’s clear from NRG’s survey is that, even for the youngest audiences, seniority is a virtue.
Art beyond time
Installation view of “Koda” and “Hank,” two Maiasaura fossil specimens. Courtesy Amanita
One last reference point for this discussion is taking shape at Amanita, a fast-rising international gallery co-founded by the young dealers Caio Twombly, Tommaso Rositani Suckert, Garrett Goldsmith, and Jacob Hyman shortly after the pandemic.
This Saturday the gallery will open Land Before Time: Three Dinosaurs and a Gondola at its main location, at 313 Bowery. The gondola in question is one of 14 works from a lesser-known series by the late American postwar sculptor John Chamberlain. Amanita has installed this strikingly skeletal, uncharacteristically horizontal hulk of aggregated scrap metal alongside a trio of fossil specimens of the Maiasaura (“good mother lizard”), a species of duck-billed herbivore prominent in the greater American West around 75 million years ago.
When I asked Hyman about the project’s origin, he told me that once he and his partners got access to the fossils, they decided they wanted “to create a more serious lens for how these things can be understood or thought about.” Chamberlain became the optical and conceptual device.
“These are objects of scale that are compressed, augmented, manipulated, and equally have this interesting telescoping of time,” he said of all four pieces in the show. “Chamberlain was drawn to these unfamiliar car parts that are so quintessential of car manufacturing in the 50s, 60s, and 70s: this vestige or relic of an important time in American industry.”
I asked Hyman whether he’s seen any strong draw toward older objects among his younger clients. “It is true that tastes are changing, and it’s not necessarily this experiential thing versus collecting objects. The instinctual and learned muscle memory of collecting is as prevalent and strong as ever,” he said, adding that this was as applicable to art as it was to other collectibles, from world-heritage or natural-history objects to sports and Hollywood memorabilia.
Although there’s a theory that some of this momentum is driven by anxiety about technology, it’s also undoubtedly a consequence of basic market mechanics, too. No matter their age or specialty, collectors tend to move into fresh zones of interest whenever they get priced out of their previous ones.
But this principle means that collectors can be priced into things, too. There’s a general consensus in the market right now that legitimate works of older art, from the post-war period to the Old Masters, now look like relative bargains (or at least, not gross overpays) compared to a lot of contemporary and ultra-contemporary works. In this situation, why wouldn’t newer buyers be open to taking a serious look at the past?
“We’re not necessarily making grand claims about these objects as American sculpture or whatever,” Hyman said of the fossils. Instead, there are “stories to be told” that “relate these things to our moment and our recently digestible history.”
To me, there’s no reason to think that this same strategy can’t be as effective for the Chamberlain—or for that matter, any other old / dead artist—as for the Maisaura. Regardless of the cultural context, age gaps can be an opportunity. It just takes a skilled narrator to lead the way.
I say “a decade or more apart” as a rough shorthand. Part of the controversy of age-gap relationships involves arguing over what how many years of difference it takes to qualify for the designation!
“Album-equivalent” consumption is a complicated metric created by the music industry to account for the expansion of listenership formats in the streaming era, partly to make the current data as comparable as possible to its equivalents when most consumption came from actually buying physical media (or even MP3s) or listening to radio broadcasts. You can find Luminate’s breakdown of the concept here.
Admittedly, a few of these may be off by a year or so because I strictly went off the birthdate listed for each artist on Wiki. This is not exactly military-grade intelligence, I realize, but it’s close enough.
Belloni also speculated that zoomers’ answers skewed ancient because (emphasis his) “To Gen Z, even if they like going to a theater for reasons other than throwing popcorn or live chickens, it’s inherently something old people do, and the stars of past decades are still the stars they associate with moviegoing.” This objection is a rare miss for Belloni. Even if Gen Z does equate the in-theater experience with geezer behavior, the prompt still asked them to name the stars that would make them the most interested in partaking, not the stars that would make other people the most interested in partaking. Since zoomer respondents were picking these actors and actresses for their own purposes, nothing else matters to me.