Wealth has long been one of the most reliable predictors of art sales. On Wealth Office, Michael Macfarlane cited a Yale professor's study charting a 300-year correlation between stock markets and the art market. With equities at record highs and art sales falling, that relationship appears to have broken. Pearl Lam, the gallerist who has spent more than two decades working between Chinese and Western art, offered several explanations. The most consequential for families may be the one she calls a geographical shift.

Heirs who would rather not inherit

Lam's starting point is a change in attitude among younger heirs in North America and Western Europe. The art market, she noted, has been discussing what Generation Z will do when it inherits whole collections. The common answer is that many will sell. What they want is experience. They do not want the responsibility of managing a collection or the rising cost of insuring it.

She was clear that tax is only part of the story. Inheritance tax can be managed through foundations and museum donations, as it has been in the United States and France, and many great American collections have passed to museums for that reason. What has changed, in her account, is the willingness of the next generation in the West to take on the responsibility at all.

Macfarlane observed that this matches the experience of many families he works with, and that it shows in market data. CNBC reports, he said, that demand for collectibles under US$100,000 is being driven by young collectors, with jewellery up 68% year on year. Lam added watches. At the last auctions, she noted, artwork went down while watches and jewellery went up, as they have for some time, provided the jewellery carries design and an important name.

Collectors who want to build

The contrast Lam draws is with the young people she meets in China, elsewhere in Asia and in the Middle East. They want to build collections. Culture, for them, is something to spread and to exchange, and a collection is one way of doing it.

She was frank about other motives. Younger Chinese collectors, she said, often buy out of ego and social pressure, matching a peer's acquisition with something larger or more expensive. Educated abroad, many want to belong to an international crowd, and so buy international art rather than the work of Chinese artists. She believes a return to supporting Chinese artists will depend, as the Chinese market always has, on encouragement from the government, which she dates to 2011.

Lam also placed this appetite in a longer tradition. In ancient China, she explained, collectors did not hang works on every wall. They kept a treasure room. Guests who loved art would drink tea, take scrolls from the shelves, unroll them and talk, or study the carving of a piece of jade. Owning art was a means of sharing it with people who understood it, and a route to social standing in a culture where wealth alone did not make a family part of the elite and the aspiration was to join the scholar class.

Motive matters more than budget

For young collectors starting out, Lam's first question is about motive. She listed the main reasons people collect: investment, social pressure and passion, along with the growing wish to preserve the value of money in an unstable world. Some investors never open the crate. Others collect because it brands them and gives them access to people they want to meet, or because art has replaced golf as the subject that keeps a guest in the conversation at dinner.

So all that is for different reasons, but they have to be honest to themselves. Why are you collecting art?

— Pearl Lam, Wealth Office

The objective, she argued, should determine the advisers and the shape of the collection, and those advisers should be chosen with care. Objectives also evolve. As passion grows, collectors tend to give more room to younger artists. She described a major Los Angeles collector in his eighties with around 150 paintings, of which five account for the collection's financial success. Most of the rest, he told her, are worthless, and loved.

What turns a purchase into an asset

For those who collect with an eye to value, Lam's test is credentials. An artist's market, she said, works like a share. Supply and demand matter, and marketing can create them. Something more is required.

But you have to have credentials. The credentials as of today it is the museum collections, museum exhibitions or very important collectors collection.

— Pearl Lam, Wealth Office

Without that support, she warned, art behaves like NFT speculation, which has not recovered because there was nothing to support it. Her artist Mr Doodle, whose career expanded after someone filmed him doodling, shows that attention can now arrive outside the traditional route. Credentials still have to follow.

This is where the geographical shift may matter most. If Western heirs sell and Asian and Middle Eastern buyers build, the collections that confer credentials may also begin to move. Lam does not claim to know how the market will reorganise. She describes the present as an adjustment period, more than two decades after collecting stopped being only for the elite. The families who build collections during it will help decide which artists carry credentials into the next one.