The art business has a Gen Z blindspot

It's time to face up to the cultural rift dividing the under-30 crowd

• Historical illustration of a tool for cataract surgery. Photo credit: The Wellcome Collection. Courtesy Look and Learn via Creative Commons license

Imagine you’re the bartender at a high-end cocktail destination. One of your regulars—a distinguished, attractive executive type nearing 60—is in a dimly lit corner flirting hard with a model-level twentysomething over martinis. To the uninitiated, it looks like a timeless scene: a wealthy elder trying to use their standing and sophistication to reel in a young catch who would otherwise be completely out of their league at this stage of life.

But you know better. The smoking hot zoomer, who you recognize from social media, is in line to inherit a gargantuan fortune. The executive, in contrast, told you after a harrowing meeting with their accountant (and one too many bourbons) a few weeks ago that they are spiraling toward bankruptcy. The desperation driving their effort tonight isn’t about sex at all. It’s about money. But their campaign to secure one last bag is backfiring in real time because of the oldest error in the book: their unwillingness to show more than the faintest interest in what their target audience actually thinks, believes, or wants.

The micro-drama above mirrors the art business’s haphazard struggle to lure in younger buyers, especially from the ranks of Gen Z. Despite their obsession with the oncoming Great Wealth Transfer, most art dealers, auction houses, and middlemen seem fundamentally uncurious about the next generations of potential collectors. Which is why there’s little to no evidence so far that they’ve noticed a crucial schism that has opened up among American youth—one that could cut off the trade’s access to billions of dollars in inherited capital unless it’s recognized and addressed ASAP.

This general dynamic won’t surprise anyone who’s been paying attention to the art market over the past five-plus years. The younger a potential client might be, the more paternalistic (if not condescending) the average art professional tends to sound when talking about them. If a little tuft of my hair fell out every time I encountered someone from the older set saying some version of “we have to educate them” about the next generations, I would have been forced to fly to Turkey to get plugs years ago. Meanwhile, I can’t remember the last time I heard someone north of 40 years old suggest that they might have something to learn from younger people.

The lack of nuance tends to pervade what little data the public gets about younger art buyers.¹ More often than not, everyone under age 45 gets thrown into one undifferentiated mass of humanity. Anthea Peers, the president of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa at Christie’s, gave one representative example in the spring 2025 Artnet Intelligence Report. “If you look at Christie’s buyers and bidders globally, about 30% are millennial or Gen Z, so aged 44 and below,” she said. Elsewhere in the report, Katya Kazakina relayed from Christie’s and Sotheby’s that “millennials and Gen Zers accounted for a quarter to a third of bidders and buyers” in 2024, “more than doubling their share in five years.” It’s very possible the auction sector is mining deeper into these next-generation findings for their own purposes. But if so, they’re not broadcasting it to the rest of us.

A monolithic view of youth extends beyond the top auction houses, too. Take Avant Arte, an international publisher of prints and multiples that deserves credit for building a community of collectors outside the typical confines of the art market. The company recently put out its second annual report on what it calls “new generation” collectors, with info mainly compiled from its proprietary database and an in-depth survey of a few thousand members. Which is great on one hand. But if you’re hoping for laser-focused conclusions about intergenerational preferences, you’re mostly out of luck. Neither report breaks out any of its findings by age groups or even familiar labels like ‘millennials’ or ‘Gen Z.’² The “new generation” is once again just one smooth schmear of potential.

All of which leaves the art market two steps behind an emerging consensus among analysts of youth culture: that it’s not even enough to separate millennials from Gen Z anymore. Why? Because history has pitched the zoomers into a cultural civil war.

Gen Z vs. Gen Z

Study after study keeps backing up the presence of an intragenerational split among the zoomers. The spring 2025 edition of the Yale Youth Poll, an undergrad-conducted, nationwide survey of America’s young voters, is the latest to uncover a fissure in political views within the 18-to-29-year-old age bracket. Elder zoomers (ages 22 to 29) leaned decisively Democratic, with +6.4% favoring a generic liberal ticket. But young zoomers (ages 18 to 21) broke hard in the opposite direction; a generic Republican ticket won the demo by +11.7%. In other words, young zoomers are going MAGA at almost twice the rate that elder zoomers are inclined to vote blue. Earlier studies (like this Pew Research-Knight Foundation survey) have shown the same phenomenon.

Rachel Janfaza, a Gen Z researcher and consultant focused on her generation’s nuances, has been calling attention to the rift for months. Her proposed solution is subdividing her native demo into Gen Z 1.0 and Gen Z 2.0. “Looking under the hood, I’ve seen social, cultural, and ideological differences among Gen Z 1.0’s younger siblings that go well beyond voting,” she wrote in a Washington Post op-ed last month. The main culprit, she argues, was Covid—or more specifically, the lockdowns and subsequent cultural upheaval they initiated:

“Gen Z 2.0 grew up in turmoil, in a world where everything seemed broken: K-12 education, social interactions, the economy, traditional institutions… Frustration with rules that seemed ineffective or hypocritical fueled a rebellious posture that has lingered, leaving Gen Z 2.0 skeptical toward people in charge who pretend to know what they’re doing.”

The division opened by the pandemic has only been widened by technology. Remember, smartphones didn’t become a bionic appendage for most Americans until around 2012 at the earliest, at which point a lot of elder zoomers were already in high school.³ Some younger zoomers, on the other hand, have been bathing their faces in the glow of handheld touchscreens literally their entire lives. AI sorts the demo in a similar way: ChatGPT et al entered elder zoomers’ lives when they were early in their careers or late in college life, while younger zoomers started toying with it in the more pliable developmental stages of middle school or high school.

Does anyone seriously think these differences don’t have colossal impacts on the way these age groups think, behave, and live? If not, what else can we call an all-ages-under-30 plan to convert new collectors besides ‘ridiculous’?⁴

Generational editing

Still, other analysts think at least one part of the art business’s unified approach to youth is right. “Gen Z and millennials are lumped together because those we call Gen Z born between 1997 and 2002 *do* have attitudes indistinguishable from millennials,” says Sean Monahan, the trend forecaster who coined the terms ‘vibe shift’ and, more recently, boom boom, the over-the-top, 1980s-indebted aesthetic poised to dominate the mid-2020s.

Although he broadly agrees with Janfaza’s diagnosis, Monahan offers a different cure. He highlights the year 2002 in the above quote because zoomers born in 2001 or earlier typically had a complete high school experience before the Covid lockdowns short-circuited childhood and adolescence across the country. Rather than subdividing Gen Z, though, he suggests a “generational edit” that keeps the familiar names while redefining their chronological borders. The end result addresses the same underlying political and cultural friction as Janfaza’s bisecting of Gen Z, but in a way that strikes me as cleaner and more directly connected to era-defining world-historical events (like the ones that inspired the naming of the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers).

In Monahan’s system (shown on the right in the graphic below) Gen X extends through 1983 instead of cutting off with 1980 as it does in the traditional model (shown on the left). For him, ‘millennial’ describes everyone born between 1984 (the year Apple introduced its personal computer) and 2001 (when the 9/11 attacks reshaped American culture and politics). His Gen Z, in turn, encompasses all birthdates from 2002 through 2020, meaning practically everyone whose growth into young adulthood was unceremoniously pipe-bombed by the Covid lockdowns.

Whether you prefer Janfaza’s approach or Monahan’s, you get routed to the same conclusion. Trying to connect with everyone under age 30, let alone under age 45, in the same way is cultural and business malpractice. The political breach is undeniable, and multiple ripple effects on culture and lifestyle are all but guaranteed to follow. It’s the reason I’m increasingly wary of the narratives about why art and culture nonprofits are hapless at connecting with younger donors, or why younger people are supposedly more interested in paying for experiences than objects: we’re probably only getting feedback from the left-leaning ones.

“Younger Gen Z skews right. But ‘skews’ is the operative word. They aren’t all Republicans. And as you noticed, probably the Zoomers in the art world skew left. The art world skews very far left. I worry that may be why art no longer influences culture,” Monahan told me.⁵

What does this mean for the big picture? “The general trend is that our ersatz elites are not directing culture. They are not an avant-garde. They are simply isolated,” he says. If art dealers and auction houses want to avoid that same lonely fate, then it’s time for them to re-evaluate who should be taking notes during their exchanges with the next generations.

1. I’m saying “younger” here, not “young,” because most millennials are midway through their working lives by this point, often with kids or mortgages or both. That older art professionals in 2025 are still talking about millennials as if they’re the pill-crazy hellions in Euphoria makes me want to black out.

2. The 2024 edition only divulged that 46% of Avant Arte’s collector base was between 18 and 39 years old, and that 80% were younger than age 50; the 2025 edition only states that half of the “cohort” were under age 40, and 75% were under age 55. (It’s not clear from the methodology whether by “cohort” Avant Arte means all of its members or just the around 3,300 people who took the latest survey.)

3. Apple first sold more than 100 million iPhones in 2012, per Statista, and I promise you that kids weren’t trying to wrestle their parents’ Blackberries or Palm Pilots out of their hands to watch Dora the Explorer or whatever.

4. There are obviously a bunch of more damning options, but I’m straining with every fiber of my being to be diplomatic here.

5. Even though it’s a tangent in this context, I couldn’t leave the following observation from Monahan on the cutting room floor: “Maybe I am out of the loop, but it seems like the shift to tech as the big wealth creator (for those millennials who have wealth) has really undercut the cultural cultivation of millennials as a demographic. Mark Zuckerberg's new house in DC for example is hideous.”