The 'Great Wealth Transfer' is currently a buzz word in the art market, but not all is as it seems. The popular narrative is of baby boomers passing trillions to their children, creating a new generation of wealthy collectors. In reality, much of the money will move first to women: because they tend to outlive their husbands, with some USD 9 trillion expected to pass horizontally to widows in the coming years.

That matters in the art market. Women tend to spend more on art than men and take greater risks in what they buy, potentially changing not just who owns art but what gets collected. Meanwhile, the transfer is already showing up in the supply of works coming to market. Single-owner collections accounted for 24% of art sold at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips in 2025, up from 9% in 2015, according to ArtTactic.

The sums are vast. UBS estimates that more than USD 83 trillion will change hands over the next 20 to 25 years; Cerulli Associates puts the figure at almost USD 124 trillion by 2048. Unsurprisingly, then, auction houses, galleries and advisers are scrambling to position themselves for the consequences. But the real story of the Great Wealth Transfer may be less about children inheriting their parents’ fortunes than about who inherits first—and what they choose to do with it.

It doesn’t always involve funerals

A recent report by Marianna Mamou, head of Advice Beyond Investing, Chief Investment Office at UBS, identifies a shift in the timing of inheritance as older generations increasingly pass on their wealth while still alive. At auction, these have included Joe and Vivienne Lewis, who sold USD 393 million worth of works at Sotheby’s this year, and Pauline Karpidas, whose auction of art and design pieces made USD 137 million through the same auction house last year. Ahead of the near USD 100 million sale of her and her husband’s 135 pieces of design this year, the beauty entrepreneur Terry de Gunzburg told the Financial Times that ‘children shouldn’t have to wait until their parents die to inherit everything.’

Mari-Claudia Jiménez, a partner and co-head of art law at Withers, and previously chairman, president Americas, and head of global business development at Sotheby’s, describes the phenomenon as ‘an interesting and unexpected twist’ in the GWT tale, allowing an easier division of wealth via cash rather than paintings. ‘Otherwise, it can lead to chaos…You are inevitably going to give one child something that is much more valuable than what you give your other children…Then you have some very angry siblings,’ she says. For the owners, she finds, a collection sale ‘can be a lifetime funeral, you get to hear your own eulogies, which can be weirdly satisfying.’

Sometimes it's more about tax than the art

A less glamorous driver of estate sales is the need for speed, notably in the US, where duties are due within nine months of death. ‘It’s a very short timetable and many people with art collections are asset rich and cash poor, with the collection forming an inordinate percentage of their worth, so there is no choice but to sell,’ Jiménez says.

Tax concerns also impact the ‘giving while living’ strategy, for which capital gains could prove too punishing (this is not applied to inheritance tax, which is generally a higher rate but a flat percentage of value, not its gain). So, people are likely to think twice about a lifetime sale of a work whose price has gone up considerably over time – say a Mark Rothko acquired in 1964 or a Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1980 – though, if they bought at the market peak, the capital gains tax burden would likely be less.

It’s less of a transfer than it seems

The unprecedented transfer of wealth may prove less dramatic than the headline figures suggest, according to a recent Visa Business and Economics Insights analysis. Looking specifically at the estimated USD 36 trillion Boomer transfer to Gen X and Millennials over the next 20 years, the analysis found that almost three-quarters of those who expect to inherit are already in the top 10% by household net worth. As a result, they find, ‘most of this wealth will flow to households that are already financially secure, making the spending impact more targeted than transformational.’ So, they expect, investments and savings will likely feel the impact more than traditional luxuries, such as homes and travel, which rely more on discretionary spend (generally given to art).

Meanwhile, revived interest elsewhere is proving more impactful at the top end of the art market. Sotheby’s reported ‘particularly strong participation’ from Asian buyers at the Lewis collection auction, accounting for over a third of its value and including the top lot, Amedeo Modigliani’s Nu assis au collier (1917-1918) for USD 64 million.

New money is in other quarters. Stock market booms in Artificial Intelligence have added more than half a trillion dollars to the wealth of America’s tech tycoons in the past year alone, according to data from Bloomberg. While self-made money has historically sought fine art, the signs are that more talking-point items, such as race cars and dinosaurs, not to mention a leather jacket worn by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang that sold for USD 960,000 in July, are the current beneficiaries.

Fresh money doesn’t mean fresh tastes

Despite such lifestyle trends, the signs are that the latest buyers favor the tried and tested. ‘There are two contrasting phenomena at the moment. There’s been a huge transfer and creation of wealth in these past few years, but it has been accompanied by increasingly conservative taste,’ says Bernie Lagrange, director at Gagosian Art Advisory. He and the curator Jasper Sharp are joining forces on a show about the influence of Magritte on contemporary art, for Gagosian’s prime Frieze season exhibition in London.

It isn’t a return to connoisseurship, mind. One driver is an increasing awareness of value, Jiménez says. ‘People don’t understand why Old Master works that have stood the test of time for 500 years have been selling for a quarter of something made in the past few years.’ At the same time ‘people care less about the theory of art,’ Lagrange says, and are instead captivated by the stories that surround an artist or their work, plus the all-important and recognizable wall power. The revival of the likes of Kahlo and Magritte ticks all these boxes.

Tech-art for all, not just for digitally native heirs

The Great Wealth Transfer is often framed as a generational handover: older collectors passing their fortunes, and their art, to digitally native heirs. But the market for technology-based art complicates that story. Interest in works that engage with new media is coming not only from younger collectors, but from established buyers with decades of collecting experience.

Art Basel’s latest Zero 10 section for art of the digital age, which had its third, expanded outing in Switzerland this year, demonstrated the range of interest, boasting sales from USD 400 for a Jan Robert Leegte NFT to USD 500,000 for a John Gerrard algorithm-based video, the latter bought by a long-standing US foundation. Saskia Draxler, co-owner of contemporary gallery Nagel Draxler, says established collectors are among the most receptive buyers on her roster. Conceptual and multimedia artists such as Kader Attia and Martha Rosler are popular, alongside Anna Ridler and Rhea Myers, who experiment with machine learning and blockchain respectively. The implication for the GWT is significant: technological fluency may not be a generational divide after all. “Our long-time collectors are just as interested in the realities and challenges of the present,” Draxler says.