THE RAPID RISE OF MILLENIAL COLLECTORS WILL CHANGE HOW ART IS BOUGHT AND SOLD

 Evan Beard

Photo by Fuse, via Getty Images.

Groucho Marx once said that he wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would accept him as a member. I feel a similar skepticism about being part of a club I never asked to join. But my 1983 birth makes me a reluctant member of what demographers and marketers now call “millennials.” Like every generation, our predecessors say we’re spoiled and self-absorbed—Time magazine called us the “Me Me Me Generation.” History may one day overlook our supposed heroic self-regard and need for safe spaces, but for now the cliché of being over-parented, over-schooled, and over-protected isn’t completely off base.

The millennial mindset

We never had a summer of ’67, where we tuned in and dropped out, nor a May of ’68 or a March of ’89, where we seriously challenged societal order. Instead, we were weaned on self-esteem culture and entered adulthood amidst the collapsing scenery of the Great Recession. As economic late bloomers, wedelayed home-ownership, marriage, and children. We moved to cities, and spent our first decade’s harvest on experiences: travel, careerist-festivals (SXSW, Art Basel, TEDx), second-wave artisanal coffee, but not stuff (and notgolf either, for some reason). We traded boomer materialism for a new kind of lifestyle consumerism. On the art scene, we socialized, gossiped, and Instagrammed, but never actually bought many pictures. Until now. Anew survey of high-net-worth collectors by U.S. Trust reveals that our latency period is finally ending. Millennials are settling down, finding our financial footing, and beginning to collect.

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-rapid-rise-millenial-collectors-will-change-art-bought-sold?utm_medium=email&utm_source=13938435-newsletter-editorial-daily-07-21-18&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_content=st-V