By Toby Skeggs

Around 100,000 years ago, in a rock shelter in the Kalahari Basin, Homo sapiens gathered 22 white calcite crystals – part of what researchers have called ‘a small cache of deliberately collected objects.’ They had no obvious practical use; they may have held a spiritual meaning, or perhaps they were simply beautiful. ‘It is ingrained in our species,’ says Larissa Mendoza Straffon, an archaeologist at the University of Bergen in Norway who studies the origins of art: ‘collecting pretty things and showing them off.’

It might seem a long way from Stone Age Kalahari to Art Basel Miami Beach, but many of our reasons for choosing an object, displaying it, and deciding who gets to see it remain the same. Throughout human evolution, Straffon writes in an essay for The Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting, ‘material signals have helped us identify allies, establish affiliations, and coordinate with like-minded people.’ An art collection, she suggests, says both ‘This is me’ and ‘These are my people.’

The survey of 3,100 high-net-worth collectors, authored by Dr. Clare McAndrew of Arts Economics, found that most opened their collections to others in some way, but few shared everything. The most private were the youngest: Among Gen Z respondents, 39% kept in-person viewing to their household or close family and friends (versus 22% overall) – almost twice the share of any other generation, and 36% did the same online (versus 26% overall). However, within invitation-only spaces such as private WhatsApp and Instagram groups, Gen Z shared more than any other age bracket, suggesting, McAndrew writes, ‘a preference for narrowing the audience rather than forgoing sharing altogether.’

Some of this may be down to younger collectors being savvier about their digital footprint and more conscious of how a public post might be reshared. But it is also about what Straffon calls ‘selective signaling,’ where who gets to see a work of art matters far more than the size of audience. Sharing the work of a little-known artist in a group chat with curators and fellow collectors, for example, can say a great deal about the owner’s eye and knowledge of the field – things that would mean little to an outsider. ‘You have to surround yourself with people who understand the signal,’ says Straffon.

This lean toward discretion is part of the wider rise of ‘quiet luxury.’ Studies cited in McAndrew’s report show that the very wealthy often prefer less obvious forms of signaling and will even pay more for ‘inconspicuous’ goods that are ‘discreetly branded or recognizable to only a few.’ This stands in contrast to the ‘conspicuous consumption’ described by the economist Thorstein Veblen during the Gilded Age, in which public display becomes a means to attaining social standing.

It may also be a sign of the times. Straffon links this more unassuming approach to periods of political and economic instability. ‘In times of crisis, people turn to quiet luxury, and they only signal within their circles,’ she says. ‘It’s an “if you know, you know” kind of situation.’ Online, other factors may be at play. In the era of AI, when it is hard to trust what we are looking at, ‘a way of showing you’re genuine is precisely by not showing off but being selective,’ she says.

Collector as custodian

For the London-based collector Yan Du, art plays both a private and a public role. Artworks, she says, ‘become an extension of how I understand myself, so living with them at home with my family is so important to that experience and how they inform my day-to-day life and values.’ She also sees herself as a custodian, lending works to institutions where they can reach wider audiences.

Du is the founder of two non-profit initiatives in London. Her foundation, Asymmetry, works behind the scenes to support curators and researchers with Chinese and Sinophone backgrounds, while YDP, a space on Bedford Square, is more public: ‘It gives Asian and Asian-diasporic artists a home in London to experiment and conceive exhibitions that would be hard to produce elsewhere in institutional or commercial contexts,’ says Du. She sees the two, alongside her own collecting, as ‘three parts of one ecosystem: separate in purpose but connected by ethos.’

For the Hong Kong-based Swiss collector Monique Burger, visibility is integral. ‘Transparency was always very important to us, because we decided not to have a space, not to have a museum, but we still wanted to share the artworks,’ she says. The Burger Collection has lent to more than 200 institutions worldwide, works with curators to stage its own exhibitions, and supports museums directly. Its current show at New York’s Drawing Center, featuring around 45 works on paper, runs until January 24, 2027, and will travel to the Asia Society in Hong Kong in March.

Early on, after they had acquired around 100 works, Burger and her husband, Max, built a website so that curators and collectors could find pieces by young artists in the collection. ‘For the artists, it was wonderful to be able to say to other collectors, to a gallerist: “The Burger Collection bought a work. Here is the website. You can go and check.”’ Today they have more than 3,000 works, and Burger wants them seen, not kept under lock and key in a Swiss bonded warehouse. ‘For me, art has to live, has to be shared,’ she says.

Nearly 40% of the collectors in the survey had lent to an institution at some point. Of those, 30% wanted the work shown anonymously, 47% preferred only discreet acknowledgment, and only 17% wanted full public credit. Here, American collectors stood out: They were among the most likely to lend (64%, second only to the UK at 67%) and were by far the most likely to seek full credit for doing so (38%).

Burger feels that associating the collection’s name with its loans is a positive for the artists. ‘We run the collection really like an institution,’ she says. ‘Why anonymous? We are proud of what we have built. And the artists love it – they are proud of being in our collection.’

The visibility of loans can also present a market opportunity, although for Burger this is not a motivating factor. Loans can provide ‘an established provenance for individual works and institutional recognition and exposure for artists,’ writes McAndrew, and ‘the resulting visibility can materially influence both the valuation of a collection and the market standing of the artists it represents.’

Privacy, however, can carry its own value. When Sotheby’s announced the USD 450 million Blaquier-Arrieta collection, to be sold in New York this November, much was made of how, for decades, it had been known only to a small coterie of collectors and museum directors. ‘Whispered about, kept from public view, it has attained an almost mythical status in the art world,’ said Philip Hook, a former director of Impressionist and Modern art at Sotheby’s. One of its key selling points, in other words, is precisely its lack of visibility.

Regional differences and cultural norms

The survey also found regional differences. Collectors in Hong Kong and Mainland China were the most private: around a third kept in-person viewing to their household or close circle – more than in any other region – and over twice the share in France (14%), where people were the most open. Online, collectors in Hong Kong were the most private by a notable margin, with 43% keeping content to their household or a few chosen individuals, followed by Mainland China at 31%, against just 14% in the US at the opposite end of the scale.

The report notes that differences in cultural norms around public displays of wealth may be one factor. In Mainland China, McAndrew adds, the discretion shown by collectors may also in part reflect sensitivity to the government’s Operation Qinglang (‘clear and bright’), which discourages the display of luxury online. Despite this circumspection about giving access online to a broad public, collectors in Mainland China led in sharing within restricted circles, such as private WeChat groups (47%) and with their own social media followers (51%). ‘Their online sharing was therefore high but tightly bounded within their own networks,’ writes McAndrew.

In China, as elsewhere, artworks speak to different people in different ways. ‘The collection becomes a kind of social vocabulary,’ writes Straffon, ‘where what matters is who understands the language.’