Can the Art Market Attract New Wealth in 2026?

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Here we are, fresh-faced and full of resolutions, a brand new year glittering with promise ahead of us! Could this be the year of the art market’s big rebound?

As we enter 2026, those in the art trade—and dealers, especially—are facing a conundrum. Yes, there is a load of money out there. Elon Musk is set to become the world’s first trillionaire. The wealth of the top 10 percent of Americans (those worth $2 million or more) has skyrocketed by nearly 50 percent since 2020, according to Federal Reserve data. And Goldman Sachs forecasts that the global economy will generate “sturdy” 2.8 percent growth this year.

What’s the issue? Only a sliver of that money may make it to the art market. Here’s why.

Recruitment Issues

In a dynamic interview with Artnet’s Kate Brown on The Art Angle podcast this week, cultural strategist and former Art Basel global director Marc Spiegler said that “galleries have been very bad at recruiting” the newly wealthy into buying art.

Looking at the chart of annual total art sales in the UBS and Art Basel report on the industry, “we all know where the market goes up and down,” Spiegler said, but after adjusting those figures for inflation, the peaks and valleys form a downward slope. In essence, he said, the market has been in decline not for the last few years, but for the last 15.

“It’s mind-boggling that, at a time when you have more potential clients, you don’t, as an industry, grow,” Spiegler said. “I think there’s a fundamental problem with how art is being positioned.”

He added that art needs to be seen as “magic.” “We have to return to the notion that artists are people who create magical objects, artists are people who create magical experiences; that having those experiences, and having those objects in your life is transformative and is a better use of your money than anything else.”

Whale Watching

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Indeed, while there may be more wealth in the world, only a subset of the tiny group that holds it buys art. Even then, the ultra-rich aren’t often seen pounding the pavement to find scrappy galleries representing emerging artists. They are more likely to be found in Mayfair, at the megas, or in the back rooms of auction houses.

This rarified tier of collectors may spend big on individual works, but it can’t support the trade in full. If you think of the art market as an environment whose purpose is to sustain cultural production at a large scale—to support hundreds of galleries and thousands of artists, to produce intangible ideas as much as financial assets, “then it’s not going to be enough to have a dozen whales coming into the market every year,” Spiegler said.

He suggested dealers focus on a model of patronage that encourages clients to “fund great projects” that offer public visibility and engagement.

If we want the new wealthy and next generation to be patrons, Spiegler argued, “we have to meet them where they are and have to give them what they want—or even better, we have to give them things they didn’t know they wanted.”

Reconsidering the Model

If last year’s gallery closures and downsizings taught the trade anything, it’s that the “expansionist—let’s call it alpha male—model of gallery development” is something that needs to be reconsidered, Spiegler said. While “it may work for the half-dozen mega galleries,” he added, it “doesn’t work further down the chain.”

The gallery model of the future is not empire building, but community building, he said, noting that London outfits like Carlos Ishikawa and Sadie Coles —which have tight groups of artists and small pools of dedicated collectors who work together to do “great things”—have proven how effective this strategy can be.

Plenty of dealers have always forged their own paths and reaped the rewards, but many others are now rethinking their trajectories as the market shifts. This includes reducing the number of fairs they do, trying out itinerant models to reduce overheads, or even adopting non-profit status in an effort to keep supporting artists and showing innovative, rule-breaking art.

“Darwin’s survival of the fittest was not only the strong survive, it’s the most adaptable survive,” Spiegler said. “I think we live in a moment where we have to learn from the crisis, give up old ways and adapt to new realities.”

If dealers really want a rebound this year, they might first have to hit reset.

Read the argument alongside market data