Art Basel and UBS have published the 2026 edition of their Survey of Global Collecting, produced with Arts Economics, drawing on responses from 3,100 high-net-worth individuals across ten markets: the US, the UK, mainland China, Hong Kong, France, Australia, Germany, Japan, Brazil and Singapore. The study's most striking finding is generational: Gen Z collectors have emerged as the highest-spending cohort in the market. The research moves beyond what collectors buy to examine how they use their collections and what ownership means to them. One counterintuitive result is that the youngest buyers are also the most guarded. Gen Z respondents were the least likely to share details of their collections publicly online, favouring invitation-only settings, with privacy described as central to their personal and cultural identity. Motivations also appear to be shifting. The survey suggests purchases are driven less by the conspicuous consumption traditionally associated with art collecting than by a wish to build connections within close networks, where standing comes less from price than from rarity, provenance, originality and discovery. Limiting access does not appear to dilute a collection's signalling power; exclusivity can itself be part of the signal. Family influence plays a growing role in how high-net-worth collectors begin building their holdings, while younger generations are purchasing more actively and turning increasingly to digital and AI-enabled tools to research their acquisitions. For the market, the survey sketches a collector base that is highly engaged and better informed — younger, quieter about what it owns, and reaching for new instruments to navigate what it buys.