In the vast global art market, the United States accounts for 42% of sales by value, roughly a third of imports and exports of arts and antiques, 38% of the world’s millionaires, and 29% of the world’s billionaires. But much like the rest of the world, US collectors are facing a range of economic and political transitions that add some uncertainty to their buying habits.

As a pent-up art market bounced back after sustaining huge losses in the first year of the pandemic, and the prices for emerging artists’ works ascended at unusual speeds, ‘We went through a small moment in time where there was a willingness for people to buy work without really having a true sense of an artist or their practice,’ says the Los Angeles gallerist Hannah Hoffman. By contrast, US collectors are now transacting more slowly, according to various findings in The Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2024. In 2023, for example, 10% of respondents confessed to impulse buying – that number dropped to just 1% this year. Furthermore, 94% of Art Basel VIPs say they prioritize seeing a work in person before finalizing their acquisition, and more than half report that they attend fewer fairs now than they did in 2019.

According to Hoffman, the slowdown can be attributed to a number of factors in the greater economy, including the rise of interest rates at the end of 2022, uncertainty in the buildup to the recent presidential election, and inflation raising the ‘soft costs’ of collecting, including shipping, storage, and insurance. But dynamics within the art market itself are playing a significant role in collectors’ more cautious approach. Many newer buyers who entered the market during its peak speculative fervor are now having to ‘reset their expectations,’ says UBS art advisory specialist Matthew Newton.

‘If you are buying work with the expectation that it is going to go up in value exponentially, it’s really difficult to sustain those expectations,’ Hoffman says. ‘People realized that things weren’t as urgent as they were being told,’ she adds. Overall, she and Newton both think transactions are now at a much healthier pace. ‘Collectors can now take a week or two to think about something, consider the price, and do their homework,’ Newton says.

 ‘It’s less about the industry’s expectation of timing and schedule, and more about what fits into the collector’s life and allows them to be thoughtful in their decision making,’ Hoffman says. A renewed interest in seeing a work in person might be a good thing, particularly, as Hoffman puts it, ‘where the work doesn’t always communicate in reproduction, or the image fails to capture the distinct magic of the work.’

As economic and political factors reach their respective inflection points – the slowing of inflation, cutting of interest rates, and final outcome of the election – the art world is watching closely for signs of renewed optimism. While high-net-worth individuals are generally insulated from the ups and downs of economic cycles, these factors do affect collectors’ overall confidence. ‘We anticipated that the uncertainty would ease post-election,’ says Nick Olney, the president of Kasmin gallery. ‘We’re very much seeing that play out now with a significant uptick in interest and sales from collectors across the globe as we head into Art Basel in Miami Beach.’

Looking ahead to the effects of the Trump presidency, Newton believes speculative energy could reenter the market as deregulation augments the value of collectors’ other assets, including stocks, private equities, and real estate. In that case, ‘those buyers are going to feel wealthier and more confident in making art purchases,’ he says. ‘I think there’s a chance that we’ll see that type of environment going ahead in the next year or two.’ Hoffman says she is looking forward to the next 6 months and ‘hopefully having a little bit more clarity.’

When it comes to American institutions, ‘It is not a secret to say that art museums are facing shrinking sources of external funding; we have seen a retraction in giving from governments, foundations, corporations, and individuals – for general operating support, exhibition sponsorship, and purchases of art,’ says Asma Naeem, the director of the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA). Across the country, museums have come up with innovative ways to fill this gap in funding, from the BMA’s sale of deaccessioned works to the pooling of resources, as in the case of the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles forming a joint collection of contemporary local artists. In an unusual move, the Toledo Museum of Art is acquiring works by providing auction houses with guarantees.

Although US museums possess a vast range in areas of focus, a common institutional priority for the past decade has been diversifying collections, in both a globalized sense and in ways that better represent their local communities. For the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), this includes a particular focus on underrepresented artists of Latin and African diasporas throughout the Americas, says PAMM director Franklin Sirmans. ‘I don’t think anybody should ever be able to present Cuban art better than us,’ he says.

At the BMA, Naeem cites progress in the addition of works by women and artists of color, as well as the recent acquisition of the collection’s first piece of performance art, Jefferson Pinder’s Ben-Hur (2012). The purchase, she says, is ‘part of a strategy to prioritize performance and collective artistic practices, to expand our time-based media holdings, and to center the work of artists with deep ties in our region.’

For individual collectors, however, priorities differ. In contrast to 2023, when both gender and racial disparities were listed among the top ten concerns within the art market, neither reappeared the following year. Instead, collectors surveyed by Art Basel and UBS in 2024 expressed sentiments of ‘an overfocus on gender and racial diversity in the market discussions in recent years that had taken away from the focus on merit, innovativeness, and other issues.’

Hoffman attributes these sentiments in part to an ongoing shift from representation toward abstraction, where ‘ideas of identity become more opaque.’ Newton also surmises that ‘a lot of galleries worked on their artist representation by quickly adding artists to their roster, perhaps without taking the time to research and strategise the types of artists that fit best into their program or the right infrastructure to support those artists.’ However, he adds optimistically: ‘We’ve witnessed a permanent shift where a lot of people who may have not felt empowered to participate as artists, as curators, as gallery owners now have the confidence to do that. I don’t think we will ever go back to a world where it’s okay to tell the story of art without a diversity of voices.’

Presented with these statistics, Naeem remains undaunted: ‘Commercial market trends certainly have an impact on the recognition, availability, and value of artists’ work, as well as an influence on collectors, but the BMA’s collecting strategy is independent and guided by the vision of a more trans-local and global dialogue about art as well as the goals of each curatorial department.’

Sirmans agrees. ‘Chances are, if you want to be a collecting member of this museum, it probably means that interests align with the way that we go about collecting,’ he says. ‘We’re collecting for a future that we don’t quite know, but it will be more a representation for us than of a market trend.’