As online auction sales keep rising, first-time buyers are entering the art world through screens rather than salesrooms
The image of the art auction still belongs, in many minds, to a very particular theatre: a polished room, a discreet paddle, a strange hush before the hammer falls. But for a growing number of buyers, the first step into collecting no longer happens under chandeliers or inside a packed saleroom. It happens online, quietly, quickly, and often without ever entering the physical space of the auction house.
According to new figures from the Artnet Intelligence Report: Year Ahead 2026, online-only fine art sales at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips, Bonhams, and Artnet Auctions reached $423.9 million in 2025, an 8 percent increasefrom the previous year. The number of lots sold remained almost unchanged at 29,623, but the average online price rose 8.6 percent to $14,309.
That shift says something interesting about the market. Online auctions are no longer just the convenient side room of the art world — the place for lower-value works, casual bidding, or pandemic-era necessity. They have become a serious entry point, especially for people who might find traditional auction culture intimidating, opaque, or simply too slow.
The numbers also show how dramatically the landscape has changed since before the pandemic. Online-only sales in 2025 were 270 percent higher than in 2019, before COVID pushed much of the auction business onto digital platforms. What began, for many houses, as an emergency adaptation has become a permanent part of how art is bought and sold.
Perhaps the most revealing detail is who is entering through this channel. Christie’s reported that 63 percent of its new buyers in 2025 made their first purchase online, suggesting that the screen has become not just a sales tool, but a kind of threshold. For a new generation of collectors, clicking “bid” may feel more natural than raising a paddle in public.
There is still a gap between online growth and the wider auction market. Artnet notes that the 8 percent rise in online-only sales was 5.3 percentage points below the market’s overall growth in 2025. But that doesn’t make the trend less important. If anything, it shows that digital auctions are settling into a more mature phase: less explosive than the pandemic boom, but more embedded, more normal, and harder to dismiss.
What online auctions offer is not only access, but a different emotional temperature. The online buyer can move through estimates, condition reports, images, and bidding windows without performing the rituals of the room. It is less glamorous, maybe, but also less guarded. For first-time collectors, that may be exactly the point.
The art market still loves exclusivity. But its newest buyers may be arriving through the least theatrical door available: a browser tab, a saved lot, a last-minute bid, and the private thrill of realising they are suddenly part of the game.
Photo: The Money Changer and His Wife (1514) by Quentin Matsys