From AI to young new artists, London wants to attract a new generation of art buyers

As the art market shows signs of slowing, London is looking to attract a new generation of art buyers — and showcase young emerging artists in the process.

Global art sales slid 4% year-on-year in 2023, according to the Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report 2024, falling to $65 billion after two years of growth.

It has led industry professionals — such as Elio D'Anna, co-founder and CEO of the House of Fine Art (HOFA) gallery in London's Mayfair district — to shift their focus toward both younger collectors and younger artists.

"Five years ago ... our target was more in the 35- to 45-year-old buyers, almost 50/50 men and women. But now we are seeing more the 25- to 35-[year-old] buyers," he told CNBC's "The Art of Appreciation."

This increase in younger collectors comes as artificial intelligence — and how it can be used to create work — remains a hot topic in the art world.

It's certainly a focus for D'Anna. HOFA represents artist Sougwen Chung, who uses a robot Chung designed to co-create work. Chung, who uses the pronoun they, calls the machine a drawing operations unit, or DOUG.

"I work primarily these days with robotic performance and artifacts, which means translating the digital in terms of data, movement data, spatial data, into really tangible works that can be experienced by an audience," Chung told CNBC.

Chung, who is a former researcher at MIT Media Lab, said they trained the robot on 20 years of data from their own drawings. "It was really, really interesting, because we could see my own stylistic input, my own decision making … transferred and translated into a machine system," they said.

One of Chung's pieces, "Spectral," was sold for $35,000 by London auction house Phillips in October as part of a sale named