A Demographic Breakdown of the World’s 200 Top Art Collectors

by Claire Voon on July 14, 2014

Last week, ARTnews Magazine published its annual list of the 200 “top” (read ‘most active’) art collectors around the world, recording the types of art the buyers collect, where they reside, and the industries in which they work.

Hyperallergic has taken it on ourselves to crunch the numbers and scan the demographics of this influential group that has sway on the art market. As expected, contemporary art remains the most popular among collectors, men dominate the art collecting scene, and a vast majority of these collectors live in North America and Europe (and none in Australia!).

We should mention some points of interest in our methodology. We counted heterosexual couples individually (one male + one female, and there were no LGBT couples on the list), and we did not count the one family (Grässlin) in order not to skew the numbers. Numbers do not always add up to 200, as many collectors collect various types of art and work in multiple fields.