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This year’s Art Basel Paris had a twist: the VIP preview on Wednesday actually wasn’t the first time visitors were let into the fair. The day before, in a newly introduced event dubbed Avant-Première,  Art Basel Paris’s 206 exhibitors were allowed to extend up to six invitations to collectors of their choosing. Avant-Première was meant to create an intimate atmosphere that differed from the busier vibe of a VIP preview, but many dealers said the day fell short of expectations.

The actual VIP preview did not. Lines began forming as early as 9:20 a.m. with visitors eager to beat the rush and be among the first to get in. It hardly seemed that the departure of director Clément Delépine, who announced last September that he was leaving for to join the Lafayette Anticipations art space, had any impact on the proceedings.

According to multiple dealers who spoke with ARTnews, experimental art was alive and well here at the Grand Palais. Kinetic art also looms large, with moving works here by Philippe Parreno at Pilar Corrias’s booth and Meriem Bennani at Ludovico Corsini’s. And that’s not to Julius von Bismarck’s installation, on view at the Petit Palais as part of Art Basel’s Public Program.

The 2025 edition has 29 first-time participants, including 13 newcomers to the main sector, among them the Approach from London and Ludovico Corsini from Brussels. Twenty exhibitors are presenting joint booths, wherein dealers team up to present art together—more than ever before at this fair.

Below, a look at the best booths at Art Basel Paris, which runs until October 26.

Christie’s Modern British and Irish Art evening sale in London on Wednesday netted £17.3 million ($23 million), marking a 20 percent increase on last year’s equivalent sale. Barbara Hepworth’s The Family of Man (Figure 9, The Bride) (1970) was the night’s highest-selling lot, going for £3.9 million ($5.2 million).

The sale’s sell-through rates were 90 percent by value and 81 percent by lot, while 39 percent of the works sold above their high estimate. However, the sale overall did fall well short of its high estimate of £22.6 million ($30 million).

(All quoted prices include buyer’s premium unless otherwise noted.)

Hepworth also took the second-highest selling lot; her Vertical Wood Form (1968) was bought for £1.4 million ($1.8 million). The Meeting (1933) by Sit Stanley Spencer sold for the same price and Bridget Riley’s Dendera (1983-2002) went for £1.2 million ($1.6 million).

Nicholas Orchard, head of Modern British and Irish art at Christie’s, told ARTnews that he was “delighted” with the result.

“It outlines the continued international demand for Modern British and Irish art, as well as Christie’s leadership in this category,” he said. “Highlights including Dame Barbara Hepworth’s The Family of Man (Figure 8, The Bride), the highest price achieved at a Modern British and Irish Art auction in London to date in 2025, and L. S. Lowry’s rare Cotswolds landscape Bourton-on-the-Water (1947)(selling for $965,200 [$1.2 million], over 60 percent above high estimate) demonstrate both the depth of quality and the enthusiasm of collectors worldwide for this category. We are thrilled to see such important works achieve strong results and look forward to building on this momentum in future sales.”

Christie’s Modern British and Irish Art day sale kicked off on Thursday, and the house is gearing up for its other 20th/21st century auctions in Paris this week to coincide with Art Basel Paris.

There’s a quiet ceremony to the way artist and acclaimed children’s book illustrator Oliver Jeffers destroys his own paintings. At each dip performance—the latest held two days before the October 3 opening of his solo show at Praise Shadows in Boston—a portrait is revealed, admired for all of five minutes, and then submerged in a vat of enamel paint until the image disappears. The invite-only audience watches (no pictures allowed) in silence as gallons of hot pink or electric blue or neutral grey slide over the sitter’s face. It’s a strangely cheerful obliteration. Then Jeffers raises a glass of whiskey and offers his usual toast, equal parts Irish wake and inside joke: “What is done is done, and what is yet to come is yet to come.”

“It’s a death of sorts,” he told me in his Brooklyn studio, “but it’s also a form of birth, the painting isn’t complete until it’s dipped.” The subject this time was the Japanese artist and recent cancer survivor Yuri Shimojo—“the last in a samurai bloodline,” Jeffers noted—who, after watching her likeness vanish beneath the paint, felt not grief but relief. The performance lasted just a few minutes. Its emotional half-life will stretch much longer.

Jeffers treats serious subjects—death, climate change, violence—with more than a soupçon of humor. His “Disaster Paintings” are proof: a red-and-white city bus floats helplessly in a bucolic lake surrounded by grassy hills; fishermen scramble to douse a boat fire while, in the background, a meteor hurtles toward Earth. “It’s the end of the world,” Jeffers said as we looked at the fisherman together in his Brooklyn studio, “but it’s also just Tuesday.”

In one work-in-progress, leaning against a wall in his studio, one of his disaster paintings that made me laugh as soon as I saw it. “You can take a bleak idea,” he told me, “and dress it in absurdity. People will look longer.” He’s a Vonnegut with a paintbrush—offering laughter as a moral stance.

The idea for the “Dipped Paintings” came to Jeffers the way a lot of his ideas do—half accident, half thought experiment. “I’d been thinking about uncertainty,” he told me, “the idea that hidden variables—forces we can’t see—still shape everything we do.”

One day in 2012 he was working on what would become the first dip painting. Distracted by the logistics of the dipping mechanism, Jeffers forgot to photograph it before lowering it into the vat. A year later he stumbled across a single image of the undipped version. “I was shocked by how wrong my memory of it was,” he said. “It looked completely different in my head. That was the moment I realized what the project was really about.” The performances started soon after. And they won’t be around forever. 

Since then, every sitter has been someone who’s stared down loss. Jeffers interviews them at length, pulling stories about mortality, chance, and change. During the performance the printed interview hangs about five feet in front of the portrait, available for reading if someone in the audience feels drawn to it. After the painting is dipped the interview, now on the floor, gets covered in drips and trickles of color when the portrait is rehung above it. “It’s about how fragile memory is,” he said, “and how quickly it slips away.”

His studio feels like an extension of himself: somewhere between a treehouse and an Oxford professor’s study. Nearly everything is made of wood at least twice Oliver’s age. Antique flat-file cabinets stack waist-high on one wall and tower eight feet on the other, labeled in his signature chalky, off-kilter capitals—the same handwriting that runs across his children’s books. Globes hang from the ceiling and perch on top of the cabinets.

In one corner sits a small white ghost from his “A Fraid of Ghosts” series—a wide-eyed little ghoul caught in monotonous moments: waiting for a phone call, trying to make small talk on a four-poster bed. “He’s terrified of being bored,” Jeffers said, laughing. “A bit like me.”

When we spoke, he wore a spotless white T-shirt, French-blue chinos patched so many times they could serve as a case study in Theseus’s Paradox, and white Vans. His hair formed a tidy James Dean swoop, tattoos flickering at his sleeves. When he talks, there’s enough energy coming off his musical Irish brogue to power two televisions and a record player.

Yng Ru Chen, founder of Praise Shadows, has known Jeffers for more than twenty years. “When I opened the gallery, I never imagined representing him,” she told me. “He already had this huge public life through his books. But for Oliver, painting has always been the core.”

Her gallery’s Boston address tends to make some of the art world’s more entrenched figures turn up their noses. At the whisper of children’s books and dip paintings they ask, “What’s his deal?” or “What’s the point?”—unable to fathom a multidisciplinary artist outside the tidy sculptor-painter-performance artist spectrum, or one who didn’t come through Yale.

Chen helped stage the Boston show and the intimate dip performance that preceded it. “Our goal,” she said, “is to make sure the general public is as aware of his fine-art practice as they are of his children’s books. He’s an artist with a capital A—painting, writing, performing, storytelling—it’s all one voice.”

Her faith seems well placed: the entire “Dipped Paintings” installation, including the vat and performance remnants, was acquired by a major collector after the Boston premiere—a first for the series, and will ultimately end up in a museum.

Jeffers’s story begins far from Boston. Born in Australia in 1977 and raised in Belfast during the Troubles, he grew up surrounded by murals, soldiers, and contradiction. “I learned to avoid trouble and talk my way out of it,” he told the Guardian in 2022. The violence left him allergic to conflict; the murals left him with an unshakable sense of design. “The militant graphics of the loyalist walls and the folksy optimism of the nationalist ones—they both found their way into my work.”

He was the sort of child who’d rather be outside than reading. “I was much more interested in mischief,” he told me, with half a grin. Still, he drew constantly, convinced even then that he was, and would always be, an artist.

After studying at the University of Ulster, he began pairing words and images—drawn to how a caption could twist meaning. That simple idea would define everything he made after.

The first result was How to Catch a Star, an art-school project published in 2004 to instant acclaim. Lost and Found followed two years later, earning him the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize. Since then his picture books—The Heart in the Bottle, The Day the Crayons Quit, Here We Are—have sold nearly fifteen million copies in forty-nine languages. “The kids’ books came as an accident,” he said. “They were made to satisfy my curiosity. It was luck that kids liked them.”

Jeffers long ago stopped worrying about the divide between fine art and children’s books. “I used to care,” he said. “Then I stopped.” The handwriting that loops across his canvases reappears in his picture books, and the same curiosity drives both. His Brooklyn studio, with its ghosts, globes, and patched trousers, proves that whimsy and rigor can coexist.

Much of his work flirts with the hard sciences, mathematics, cosmology. In Meanwhile Back on Earth—a kind of illustrated peace manifesto—a father drives his children through the solar system to show them how petty human conflict looks from space. “Perspective can come from time or distance,” Jeffers writes. “When you take a deep breath, you calm down because that gives you the perspective of time. When you get far enough away, the battle doesn’t seem so important anymore.”

He’s turned that philosophy into an artistic through-line: a belief that humor, perspective, and empathy are the only real antidotes to catastrophe.

That idea found a perfect home in 2022, when the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum invited Jeffers to create its Anne H. Fitzpatrick façade. During his residency he painted Universes: a woman reading by lamplight while, above her, a deep-blue cosmos unfolds into constellations and comets. It was classic Jeffers—domestic intimacy set against infinite space. “He’s always playing between the cosmic and the everyday,” Chen said. “It’s his sweet spot.”

The project coincided with his first Praise Shadows solo, a hint of the creative momentum that would crest in 2025. Between the Gardner façade, the new “Dipped Paintings” exhibition, and a new Brooklyn Museum collaboration, Jeffers had quietly orchestrated his own small universe—each project orbiting the same questions of memory, time, and perspective.

At the Brooklyn Museum, Life at Sea expands that orbit. The installation, designed by the museum’s contemporary-art and education departments, invites visitors to build their own floating worlds. “There’s a real generosity in Oliver’s work,” said Sharon Matt Atkins, the museum’s deputy director. “He connects people to complex ideas in very accessible ways.”

The room glows with soft blues and greens; models of imaginary boats drifted in shallow pools. “It’s about care,” he said. “We’re all at sea, trying to navigate.” Then, smiling, he added, “Only difference is some of us have GPS.” The interns laughed, and so did he.

Atkins called the show a full-circle moment. Thirteen years earlier, Jeffers’s first dipped painting—Without a Doubt Pt. 2—had hung in the museum’s community-curated exhibition Go. Now he was back, his practice expanded to fill a department of its own.

His newest picture book, Bridget’s Busy Day was released on October 7. It follows a girl who discovers that friendship matters more than productivity. “It’s a funny little fable,” he said. “But it’s also about slowing down—something I’m still trying to learn.” On October 14 Jeffers hit late night with an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to talk about his new book—a rare mainstream spotlight for an artist who still talks about memory like a physicist and loss like a comedian.

That tension between absurdity and permanence runs through everything Jeffers makes. “All art is about time,” he told me as we packed up to leave his studio. “Some people try to freeze it. I like to acknowledge it.” The “Dipped Paintings” will conclude in 2027 at the Ulster Museum in Belfast—the city where he grew up and, during the pandemic, returned to live. He’s got the final subject in mind already, but wouldn’t share who it would be, a funny little performance in itself.

“I knew from the start he’d be the last one,” Jeffers said. “It felt right—this person’s seen more endings than anyone I know.”

Until then, he’ll keep moving—between Brooklyn and Belfast, between picture-book worlds and vats of enamel, between catastrophe and punchline. In his studio, a porcelain rocket bobs in a sea of blue like a rubber duck that took a wrong turn. It’s funny and a little heartbreaking, which is precisely the point. Jeffers doesn’t paint to preserve the world; he paints to remind us how ridiculous it is that we ever thought we could.

As the hunt for the Louvre jewel thieves continues, approximately 100 investigators have turned to DNA evidence found at the crime scene to help bring the perpetrators to justice.

Investigators are looking into traces of DNA samples that were left on a helmet and gloves in the Apollo Gallery. It is unclear, however, if the DNA belongs to the suspects who made off with eight pieces of jewelry, NBC News reported.

NBC News also reported the emergence of a new video overnight that was filmed by a member of the public, capturing the thieves escaping from the museum. It shows two men, one in a yellow vest with a black mask and another clad in all black with a motorcycle helmet.

Audio from the film picked up the sound of a walkie-talkie with a voice saying in French, “Looks like the individuals are on scooters. They are leaving, they are leaving.” Law enforcement received roughly 4,500 cameras worth of footage, “in addition to some 38,000 interconnected cameras,” Parisian officials said in a news release on Thursday.

Robbers broke into the museum‘s Apollo Gallery on Sunday using a cherry picker and an angle grinder to steal in less than eight minutes nine pieces of jewelry (one of which was recovered outside of the museum shortly after it was dropped by the robbers) worth an estimated $102 million.

Though museum director Laurence des Cars said the alarms functioned properly at the time of the heist, the lack of camera footage in the gallery or eyewitnesses has led to heavy scrutiny of the Louvre’s security system. Staff had previously accused museum leadership of postponing security upgrades amid a staff shortage, and an audit of the Louvre leaked after the heist called the security “outdated.”

The Louvre reopened yesterday, but the Apollo Gallery is still closed in light of the ongoing investiagtion.

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THE HEADLINES

LOUVRE UNCOVERED. The smash-and-grab at the Louvre onSunday, when masked thieves stole jewels once belonging to Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie in broad daylight, is becoming an exponential embarrassment for the museum. With French officials already blushing at the apparent ease of the robbery and a leaked audit suggesting the Louvre’s security systems were “outdated and inadequate,” Emmanuel Macron’s government has now revealed that the loot is not privately insured. This revelation is particularly painful for the museum because the jewels were valued at $102 million, a Paris prosecutor said on Tuesday. This comes after French authorities claimed they were of “incalculable” value. According to the French culture ministry, the country would not be reimbursed for any losses linked to the stolen items if they are not recovered by the police. Officers are continuing to investigate but leads have been thin on the ground. A culture ministry spokesperson said in a statement first reported by French newspaper Le Parisien: “The state acts as its own insurer when national museums’ works are in their typical place of conservation.” The French state is usually liable for artworks and objects in its national collection, but museums almost always buy insurance cover when transporting works or lending to another institution. The culture ministry said that the insurance value is “very often higher than the value of acquiring the work.” 

WOMEN & GEN Z TOPPLE BOOMERS. The Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025 reads like a snapshot of an art world at a hinge moment—between generations, values, and the physical and digital spheres that define culture today, ARTnews’ Daniel Cassady writes. Conducted across ten markets with 3,100 high-net-worth collectors, the report offers quantitative proof of something the art world has sensed for years: the future of collecting no longer belongs to a small fraternity of boomer patrons. Instead, as this year’s report indicates, it’s increasingly shaped by women and by the first generation to grow up online. Nearly three-quarters of the survey’s respondents are Gen Z or Millennials, a demographic shift that’s redefining how taste, access, and value are negotiated in real time. These younger collectors are more global, more digital, and more comfortable collapsing the boundaries between art, design, fashion, and technology. For them, collecting isn’t merely ownership—it’s participation. And the numbers prove it. Gen Z collectors now allocate an average 26 percent of their wealth to art, the highest share of any age group. Their portfolios stretch beyond paintings to include digital works, limited-edition design, even sneakers and sports assets. The report’s foreword notes that art “increasingly sits alongside design, luxury goods, and lifestyle collectibles,” blurring the old hierarchies between aesthetic judgment and personal branding.

The Digest

Archaeologists in Croatia have discovered a rare mass grave inside ancient water wells at Mursa (modern-day Osijek), revealing the bodies to be soldiers of diverse backgrounds who may have fought in the Battle of Mursa around 260 CE. The multidisciplinary investigation, published in PLOS ONE, provides new insight into how the Roman Empire recruited armies from ethnically diverse backgrounds. [Phys Org]

James Turrell is bringing his “most ambitious” installation to Denmark next June, when his Skyspace work will be shown at the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum. [The Art Newspaper]

The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver has announced Anthony Kiendl as its next director, effective December 1. Kiendl, who holds dual US and Canadian citizenship, was most recently chief executive and executive director of the Vancouver Art Gallery, which he departed this past March. He will step into the role vacated by Nora Burnett Abrams. [Artforum]

British conceptual artist Anish Kapoor’s striking pigment sculptures and “depth-defying small forms” will be on view in the exhibition “Anish Kapoor: Early Works” at the newly refurbished Jewish Museum in New York, which reopens to the public on October 24. [Hyperallergic]

The Kicker

Art heists are all the rage at the moment, after two museums in Paris, including the Louvre, were looted over the last few days. But if Laurence des Cars, the Louvre’s director, is embarrassed about the way the guards were hoodwinked in broad daylight, it’s nothing compared to the shame felt by the fictional museum director in new movie The Mastermind. Written and directed by Kelly Reichardt, it follows “a bumbling art thief [who] steals four paintings from a museum where the guards are literally asleep on the job—and [he] still doesn’t get away with it,” Brian Boucher writes for Artnet News. “It’s less The Thomas Crown Affair and more Burn After Reading, but the laughs are subtler, everything moves much slower, and the characters are more finely shaded, in classic Reichardt style.” Out now in movie theaters. 

The Palais de Tokyo in Paris took down a Cameron Rowland piece not long after it went on view, appending new wall text that notes that the removed work may have been “considered illegal.”

Rowland’s work, titled Replacement (2025), was commissioned for “ECHO DELAY REVERB,” a recently opened exhibition that focuses on American artists who have been influenced by French theory. The show was organized by Naomi Beckwith, deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the artistic director of Documenta 16.

Replacement involved switching out the French flag that normally hangs above the museum with the Martinican one. As usual for Rowland’s work, the piece comes with an extended caption explicating the history behind the artist’s gesture.

“Since it was colonized by the French in 1635, Martinique has been a part of France,” the caption begins. “Martinique remains part of the French nation-state as an overseas department. France remains reliant on Martinique. Black Martinicans have pursued the end of French rule for 390 years.”

The caption goes on to quote the mission statement of the Mouvement Indépendantiste Martiniquais, a French political party that seeks Martinican independence. That statement reads, “Martinique remains a politically dominated territory, economically exploited, militarily occupied, culturally alienated and fettered by the European free-trade agenda, which prohibits any idea of lasting protection for our island economy.”

Rowland’s piece uses the flag adopted by Martinique in 2023, featuring bands of black and green, along with a red triangle—not the one that France had used prior to then, with a white cross and four snakes.

Replacement went on view on Wednesday, along with the rest of “ECHO DELAY REVERB.” On Thursday, Rowland’s New York–based gallery, Maxwell Graham, said on Instagram that the work had been taken out of the show.

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The gallery posted to Instagram images of the piece’s new wall text, which reads, “Palais de Tokyo has determined that Cameron Rowland’s artwork could be considered illegal. As a result it is no longer included in the exhibition.”

The Palais de Tokyo and a representative for Rowland did not respond to request for comment.

Although it wasn’t immediately clear what was unlawful about Replacement, relations between France and Martinique have remained strained in the past year.

In 2024, Martinique was roiled by protests over high food prices. At the time, food prices there were 40 percent higher than they were in mainland France, according to the Agence France-Presse. The protests turned violent, resulting in the death of one person as a police station was set on fire. France subsequently called in an anti-riot police force that had been banned for more than six decades prior, and Martinican authorities banned the demonstrations.

Rowland’s work has been widely shown in the US and Europe, where the artist is acclaimed for their sculptures composed of ready-made objects enlisted to address histories that are under-known or largely invisible. Past works have addressed mass incarceration, systemic racism, the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, and land ownership.

The British Museum’s inaugural ball, dubbed London’s answer to the Met Gala, raised more than £2.5 million ($3.3 million), with proceeds “securing vital funding for [our] international partnerships,” the museum said in a statement.

Last Saturday’s £2,000 ($2,700)-a-ticket fundraising event, attended by celebrities and prominent names including Mick Jagger, Janet Jackson, Tracey Emin, James Norton, and Naomi Campbell, featured a silent auction. Guests could bid on a pet portrait by Emin, a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum’s scientific research laboratories, a special preview of the Bayeux Tapestry when it arrives on loan next year, and a private dinner with the institution’s director, Nicholas Cullinan.

During the evening, the museum announced a £10.3 million ($13.7 million) pledge from the Garfield Weston Foundation. “This major contribution will enable the museum to move forward with our Visitor Welcome Program, which includes new Visitor Welcome Pavilions at both the North and South entrances. The program will create a world-class visitor welcome through cutting-edge design, horticulture, and a reimagining of the museum’s famous forecourt,” it said.

The star-studded event was not without controversy, though, after an unnamed woman gained access to the museum’s Great Court dressed as a waitress. She was seen in a video posted online by Energy Embargo for Palestine, an organization based in Britain, standing on stage next to George Osborne, chair of the museum’s board of trustees, holding a sign reading “DROP BP NOW.” The British Museum has drawn criticism for accepting a £50 million ($67 million) sponsorship from the oil and gas giant that is “causing climate collapse” and “actively enabling the genocide in Gaza,” the evening’s protestor claimed.

Not only this, but after the ball, Greece’s culture minister, Lina Mendoni, blasted the British Museum for allowing the 800 or so guests to get merry around the Elgin Marbles. She said the museum showed “provocative indifference” to the collection of ancient Greek sculptures from the Parthenon and other structures from the Acropolis of Athens by entertaining next to them. Mendoni condemned the use of the marbles as mere “decorative elements,” saying such events disrespect the cultural significance of the sculptures and risk their preservation.

The smash-and-grab at the Louvre on Sunday, when masked thieves stole jewels once belonging to Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie in broad daylight, is becoming an exponential embarrassment for the museum. With French officials already blushing at the apparent ease of the robbery and a leaked audit suggesting the Louvre’s security systems were “outdated and inadequate,” President Emmanuel Macron’s government has now revealed that the loot is not privately insured.

This revelation is particularly painful for the museum because the jewels were valued at $102 million, a Paris prosecutor said on Tuesday. This comes after French authorities claimed they were of “incalculable” value.

The culprits, who are still on the run, broke into the Louvre using a furniture lift to access the first floor. They then cut into display cases and lifted a diamond encrusted broach that belonged to Eugénie, as well as diadems and necklaces. The thieves also got their hands on the empress’s crown but dropped it as they made their escape.

According to the French culture ministry, the country would not be reimbursed for any losses linked to the stolen items if they are not recovered by the police. Officers are continuing to investigate but leads have been thin on the ground.

A culture ministry spokesperson said in a statement first reported by French newspaper Le Parisien: “The state acts as its own insurer when national museums’ works are in their typical place of conservation.”

The French state is usually liable for artworks and objects in its national collection, but museums almost always buy insurance cover when transporting works or lending to another institution. The culture ministry said that the insurance value is “very often higher than the value of acquiring the work.”

Private institutions, like the Pinault Collection or the Fondation Louis Vuitton, for example, typically purchase commercial insurance cover for their collections.

Charlie Horrell, head of fine art at international insurance broker Marsh, told the FT that “for an institution like the Louvre, it’s almost impossible to insure your entire collection.” According to the paper, fine art coverage in London’s speciality insurance market totals around $4 billion.

The FT also reported that several insurance market executives said the Louvre’s collection alone would “overwhelm the market… with treasures ranging from Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to the Great Sphinx of Tanis being almost impossible to value or appraise.”

Laurence des Cars, the Louvre’s director, blamed a “terrible failure” in security at the Paris museum for last weekend’s crown jewel heist while she was being grilled by French senators. She added that she offered her resignation to France’s culture minister, but it was refused. Des Cars acknowledged that staff “did not detect the arrival of the thieves soon enough.”

The Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025 reads like a snapshot of an art world at a hinge moment—between generations, values, and the physical and digital spheres that define culture today. Conducted across ten markets with 3,100 high-net-worth collectors, the report offers quantitative proof of something the art world has sensed for years: the future of collecting no longer belongs to a small fraternity of boomer patrons. Instead, as this year’s report indicates, it’s increasingly shaped by women and by the first generation to grow up online.

A New Class of Collectors

Nearly three-quarters of the survey’s respondents are Gen Z or Millennials, a demographic shift that’s redefining how taste, access, and value are negotiated in real time. These younger collectors are more global, more digital, and more comfortable collapsing the boundaries between art, design, fashion, and technology. For them, collecting isn’t merely ownership—it’s participation.

And the numbers prove it. Gen Z collectors now allocate an average 26 percent of their wealth to art, the highest share of any age group. Their portfolios stretch beyond paintings to include digital works, limited-edition design, even sneakers and sports assets. The report’s foreword notes that art “increasingly sits alongside design, luxury goods, and lifestyle collectibles,” blurring the old hierarchies between aesthetic judgment and personal branding.

The Feminization of the Market

At the same time, the most profound wealth story of the decade—the Great Wealth Transfer—is underway. UBS estimates more than $83 trillion will pass between generations over the next few decades, with women expected to control a serious share of the pie. By the end of 2024, women already controlled more than a third of global wealth, a share projected to rise sharply in the future.

You can see that growing power in their collecting patterns. Across 2024 and the first half of 2025, female collectors outspent men by 46 percent, closing the historical gap in both activity and influence. 

The contents of their collections mirror that growing parity: works by women now account for 49 percent of holdings among female collectors, compared with 40 percent among men.

The symbolic and material consequences are massive. For decades, institutional parity was a philanthropic goal; now, gender balance is being driven by market forces. Women are not just buying differently—they’re building a different canon.

Digital Art Goes Mainstream (Again)

One of the report’s more striking discoveries is how quickly digital art has (re)entered the mainstream. Fifty-one percent of high-net-worth collectors purchased a digital artwork in 2024–25, nearly tying sculpture for third-largest medium by value. (Sixty-seven percent of participants said they purchased a painting, and 56 percent a sculpture.)

Digital purchases are no longer the novelty of crypto’s tacky 2021 bubble. Instead, they represent an increasing coziness with the way art is made, bought, traded, and displayed. The report describes a “growing comfort with fluid, hybrid modes of exchange,” a sentiment that now extends from online viewing rooms to direct messages between artists and buyers.

The Rise of the Direct Relationship

That fluidity shows up in how art changes hands. In 2024–25, 63 percent of collectors purchased directly from artists, up from 27 percent two years earlier and 43 percent from 2022.

Nearly half of all high-net-worth buyers used social media to do it: 43 percent bought from studios, 37 percent commissioned works, and 35 percent purchased via Instagram links.

The old hierarchy—dealer first, artist second—is slipping. Sure, galleries remain the most trusted channel overall, but the survey finds that collectors’s second-most-preferred route is now direct purchase, a category that’s more than doubled in just one year.

Rethinking Risk

Conventional wisdom says women are more risk-averse investors. In art, that’s proving to be wildly untrue. The survey shows 55 percent of women frequently buy works by unknown artists, compared with 44 percent of men, despite both groups rating such purchases as high-risk. In other words, they recognize the risk and do it anyway.

The data suggests a cultural confidence—one that treats discovery as both social capital and artistic responsibility. The market’s appetite for “emerging” may have chilled but, for women collectors, risk is a form of authorship.

From Frenzy to Stability

After years of froth, 2025 looks surprisingly calm. Selling intentions have fallen by more than half since 2024, dropping from 55 percent of collectors to 25 percent, while 84 percent remain optimistic about the market’s direction and only four percent pessimistic.

That optimism is rooted in a shift from speculation to stewardship: more collectors plan to donate works to museums or pass them to family than to sell them.

Collecting as Identity

Threaded through the report is a subtle, but seismic change in motivation. Collecting has become less about possession than about projection—of values, affiliations, and personal narratives. As the Art Basel foreword puts it, today’s collectors pursue “a widening definition of connoisseurship, where art increasingly sits alongside design, luxury goods, and lifestyle collectibles,” reflecting an “expression of identity shaped as much by personal pleasure and social connection as by financial motivation.”

That sentence may be the truest measure of where the art world stands in 2025: wealth is transferring, tastes are diversifying, and collecting—once the province of legacy—is now an act of self-definition, or if you’re more cynical, of branding.

 Louis Vuitton and Takashi Murakami are enjoying a second honeymoon. 

Hot on the heels of the reedition of their seminal collaboration from the early 2000s, the French luxury brand and the Japanese artist have reunited for another project: a dedicated Artycapucines collection unveiled on Tuesday with a spectacular booth at Art Basel Paris. 

Murakami and the Vuitton team have drawn inspiration from some of his best-known artworks, including his signature Panda character and “smiling flower” motifs, for 11 interpretations of the brand’s Capucines handbags that are bursting with color and sculptural detail. 

Since 2019, Vuitton has tapped 30 contemporary artists including Urs Fischer, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Ewa Juszkiewicz and Beatriz Milhazes to put their stamp on the bag. The results, at the crossroads between fashion and art, intrigued Murakami.
“They all looked like sculptures,” he told WWD. “It was very mysterious, and the process was very interesting.”

The artist noted that technology has progressed by leaps and bounds since he first collaborated with the brand on his Monogram Multicolore designs, unveiled at Vuitton’s spring 2003 show under then-creative director Marc Jacobs. 

The line was relaunched this year with more than 200 references, ranging from City Bags to accessories such as silk scarves, sunglasses, fashion jewelry, sneakers, perfume bottles and a skateboard.

The Artycapucines project goes one step further, with creations that are fully three-dimensional, such as the Capucines Mini Tentacle, a pink bag inspired by his 2017 sculpture “DOBtopus,” which transformed the artist’s alter ego character Mr. DOB into an octopus.

Composed of more than 450 individual elements, it requires 75 days to assemble. The body of each tentacle is crafted out of resin, and the individual suckers are then painted and polished before being applied by hand. 

“There’s tremendous improvement and advancement of techniques on Louis Vuitton’s side, but on my side as well. I now have the 3D team in my studio, so we could really accurately and minutely exchange the corrections and revisions between the Louis Vuitton team and my team,” Murakami noted. 

Art and Commerce

The Vuitton stand at Art Basel is likewise dominated by an eight-meter-high sculpture of an octopus, inspired by Chinese lanterns, which Murakami described as a way of countering potential criticism of his ongoing practice of blurring his art practice with his brand collaborations.

Associate partner of Art Basel Paris for the third consecutive year, Vuitton also presented Murakami’s work in a dedicated booth at Art Basel Hong Kong in March. 

“To be completely honest, doing such a presentation at an art fair, as an artist, is very nerve-wracking,” he said, noting that 20 years ago, he faced blowback in some art circles for incorporating the Vuitton monogram into some of his paintings. “People always wonder about whether art should be marketed so much commercially.”

He noted that octopuses have been known to eat their own arms, a behavior that in Japan has been linked to the need to survive. His Mr. DOB character is a metaphor of his anxiety about cannibalizing himself through overexposure.

“Sometimes I fear that I’m trapped in my own trap, and then starting to shrink,” the artist explained. “So even though this presentation is so huge, central and maybe a little too big in the Grand Palais context, because it’s my octopus, which is really about criticizing myself and reminding myself of these fears, I hope that’s forgiven.”

A self-confessed “otaku,” a Japanese term that loosely translates as “geek,” Murakami has long incorporated elements of sci-fi, anime and whimsical kawaii characters into his practice, but he also references traditional Japanese painting. 

The Capucines BB Golden Garden bag draws inspiration from his recent artwork “Ogata Kōrin’s Flowers,” an homage to the chrysanthemum fan designs of Ogata Kōrin, a renowned artist from the 18th-century Edo period. The bag is made of leather covered with gold leaf, with leather marquetry combining five different textures to render the blooms.

Other highlights of the collection include the Panda Clutch, hand-set with 6,250 rhinestones, and the Capubloom, inspired by the “Flower Matango” sculpture exhibited in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles in 2010. Here, it has been rendered as a sphere adorned with 3D resin flowers in more than 115 candy-colored shades. 

Possibly the most psychedelic of all is the Capucines Mini Mushroom, a silver canvas bag, which — as the name indicates — is crawling with multicolored resin mushrooms.

Dynamiting Codes

Noting that all the bags were created in close collaboration with Vuitton’s design team, Murakami said he had no hesitation about playing with the Vuitton codes, for instance splicing the LV logo in half on the Capusplit BB, or painting his signature on black crocodile leather on the Capucines Mini Autograph.

When he originally partnered with the brand 20 years ago, merely tinkering with the colors of the monogram was seen as revolutionary. Nowadays, blowing up brand signifiers has become a trend, he noted. 

“Everyone does it in order to attract attention, so this time for this project, I don’t feel like I am trying to play a role of someone who destructs or disrupts. It’s really about Louis Vuitton’s creative team coming up with all sorts of ideas really freely,” he said. 

“I’m just in the back trying to support that creativity, so I really feel that with this collection, what’s the newest and what’s the most significant is the creativity of the people on the ground making these,” he added.

All the bags from the Artycapucines VII — Louis Vuitton x Takashi Murakami collection will be available in highly limited editions, though Vuitton declined to communicate on the number of bags and their price, referring inquiries to client advisers in stores. 

The original designs launched in the early 2000s were an instant hit, worn by “It” girls like Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Jessica Simpson and the fictional queen bee character Regina George in the cult movie “Mean Girls.” 

While Murakami hoped the reedition would allow him to reach a new generation of fans, the results surpassed his expectations. 

“I was surprised, when the reedition came out, that a lot of people — most people actually — didn’t know about my original collaboration 20 years ago. I really just assumed that they did, but including older customers, they all felt that this was new and fresh,” he reported. “In that sense, I think I’m reaching a new audience.”