Blue Ivy Carter sent eyebrows skyrocketing over the weekend when the 10-year-old daughter of Beyoncé and Jay-Z raised her paddle at the 2022 Wearable Art Gala auction and bid over $80,000 on a pair of Lorraine Schwartz earrings, the highest-priced lot of the night.
While the baubles ultimately went to Mielle Organics founder Monique Rodriguez with a winning bid of over $105,000, in 2018, Carter bid $17,000 for a painting of a young Sidney Poitier at the same Wearable Art event, later upping her bid to $19,000 before ultimately losing out to Tyler Perry. Later that same evening, Carter bid $10,000 on an artwork made out of repurposed law and medical books and won the lot—she was 6 at the time.
While adult celebrities and the ultra-wealthy spending exorbitant sums at auction is nothing new, a pre-teen throwing around more than an average New Yorker’s annual salary seems like even more of a perk reserved for the 1%. But for some adult collectors of considerable means, introducing their children to buying art at a young age feels like a natural next step.
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“It’s really these clients that are multi-millionaires or billionaires that have the ability to start getting their children into it,” Jennifer Garland Ross, the founder of NYC-based art advisory firm Art Peritus LLC, told The Daily Beast.
Garland doesn’t know offhand the most a child of a client of hers has spent at auction, but “we’re talking five to six figures, the low six figures,” she said.
“With a few of our clients, it’s very interesting seeing their children’s collections that started when they were in their teens, and that each child has a very different eye for collecting,” Garland Ross said. “Seeing how one child goes for the more unusual abstract pieces, whereas another one goes for the very traditional 18th century decor-type collecting across the board—from furniture and decorative arts to jewelry and wine—is very interesting.”
Another thing kids go for? “Cars,” Garland Ross said. “I mean, what kid isn’t gonna try to buy the car that his father has?”
According to a 2007 article in the Wall Street Journal, Dakota King, the descendant of a family of art collectors, started buying contemporary art at age four, and several of the most prominent young art collectors on the scene today got their start before they could legally drink.
By the time she turned 20, makeup mogul Kylie Jenner had already built an intimidating collection that includes work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Beau Dunn and Tracey Emin; Kris Jenner, Kylie’s mother, is a fan of Emin as well.
Venture capitalist George Merck received his first piece of art from his mother as a teenager: at the age of 27, he’s amassed a collection that includes work by Jim Dine and Peter Alexander, and he’s also on the board at The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
At only 16, Jaiden Stipp, aka Jasti, has already cultivated a $1 million collection of NFT art. Carson Guo, the son of a high-powered executive at a prominent Chinese conglomerate, placed his first winning Sotheby’s bid at 17, dropping $800,000 on 248 Supreme skateboard decks.
Whether or not children and teenagers have the cognitive capacity to understand how much they’re spending, or the value of what they’re buying, which could always fluctuate, seems like a question that could be answered in a number of different ways.
But you don’t have to reach a certain age in order to purchase art at auction: you only need to prove that you have the means to back up your bid.
“Auctions now verify the credentials of whoever’s bidding, and if they have the financial capacity to pay,” Ray Waterhouse, the chairman of Fine Art Brokers art advisory, told The Daily Beast. “If you register for an auction, you’re not asked your age, you’re asked for your bank details.”
“I have one client in particular who lives in Miami whose son, at age 12, was already buying and selling designer trainers for hundreds or thousands,” Waterhouse said. “Every time my client views an auction, he takes his son along, so they’re teaching them young.”
A now-adult collector whose father introduced him to art auctions as a teenager, and who wished to remain anonymous, told The Daily Beast that the practice is misunderstood.
“He wasn’t introducing us to art in the sense of, like, ‘This too can be yours, buy it,’” the anonymous collector said. “It was more like, ‘Here’s my friend’s show, and here’s the gallery, and let’s go! Or, let’s go to the museum. It wasn’t in an overly commercial sense at all.”
At the time, “[my father] might buy something that I might be unaware of, and for the purposes of future inheritance or something, he might put it in my name or my mom’s name or his company’s name or in his name,” the anonymous collector said. “I would have seen [the piece], but he wouldn’t have said, ‘this is yours, this is in your collection.’ Only when I moved into my own apartment, and I had a job and I would maybe go and buy something small, only then would I ever have started calling something mine.”
For certain consultants, however, children participating in auctions just sounds ridiculous. “My clients are serious people,” art advisor to the stars Maria Brito told The Daily Beast. “They don’t let their minor kids play with their money.”
