Silicon Valley’s plutocrats are shaking up culture in the region

In a former gym in a gentrifying warehouse district, a maple tree, complete with roots, is suspended in the air. Immersive screens depict streams and plants. The inaugural exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco (ica sf), by Jeffrey Gibson, a Native-American artist, is meant to reveal humanity’s connection to the Earth and its despoliation.

The uprooting also symbolises the disruption for which the home of the technology industry is famous. The museum itself marks a break with the past. Local artists and performers have long complained that the tech industry does little to support them. Now, for the first time, Silicon Valley’s plutocrats are underwriting a new cultural institution in their own backyard.

The founder of ICA SF is Alison Gass, a seasoned curator with many connections in Silicon Valley. The core backers are art-lovers who made fortunes in tech: angel investors, venture capitalists and the co-founders of Slack and Instagram. The arts programme at Meta (previously Facebook) pitched in. At $5.5m, this sort of giving is a new departure for a cohort of tech titans who hitherto have not matched their forebears’ artistic philanthropy.

Early Silicon Valley firms such as Hewlett-Packard, Apple and Adobe have funded local arts institutions for decades. Yet by 2016, according to a report called “The Giving Code”, only about 15% of Silicon Valley philanthropy was staying in the area. The arts were not a priority. At the same time, the influx of tech wealth has pushed up rents in the past decade, forcing out creative types, galleries and studios; today it costs 30% more to live in San Francisco than in New York. Amid this displacement, there is a “deep chasm” between tech’s resources and its artistic giving, argues SVCreates, an arts-support group.

An obvious reason is that “there are a million things” the wealthy can choose to support, says David Hornik, a venture capitalist who, with his wife Pamela, invested in the new museum. On a planet that is “flooding and burning, there are lots of alternatives to the arts that are drawing people’s dollars”. Tech tycoons have poured billions into global issues such as poverty and education; locally, Marc Benioff of Salesforce and Mark Zuckerberg have built hospitals. A few billionaires are big art-buyers, such as Larry Ellison of Oracle and the late Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, whose collection will be auctioned in November. Yet collectors alone do not sustain a cultural ecosystem.

Tech has good reasons to support culture, argue boosters of the arts, particularly in northern California. Computer technology evolved in the creative ferment of the Bay Area’s counterculture (with some help from the defence industry). Art and tech are natural bedfellows—“analogous forms of creative problem-solving”, observes Tina Vaz, head of Meta’s arts programme. Tech projects such as the metaverse need the imagination of artists, she says. Meanwhile the arts—from film and performance to painting and music—can be a means to bridge social gulfs and help tackle other problems that techies hold dear.

These messages are now being heard by a new wave of tech leaders. Founders and investors were galvanised by the health and social crises of 2020, and by the worsening inequality visible around them. The difference from previous generations lies in their approach. Museum directors and fundraisers around San Francisco Bay say today’s tech donors have little interest in galas or seeing their names on plaques. Their aim is rather to revise old ways of doing business and make the art world more responsive and accessible.

Take the ICA SF: its seed funding came from Andy and Deborah Rappaport, investors who previously started a communal arts complex to support galleries facing eviction in San Francisco. It will show living artists—with an emphasis on those neglected by the canon—and “respond to the complex social reality in which we live”, says Ms Gass. In this it resembles a tech startup, a “platform” that can quickly “pivot” to new projects. That risk-taking attitude is “a very venture-capital way of looking at things”, Mr Rappaport says.

Giving in a material world

Other tech donors are innovating, too. New models include direct payments to artists, an approach tried by some European governments but uncommon in America. This year a guaranteed-income scheme in San Francisco is supported by $1.3m from MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, and #StartSmall, a foundation created by Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter. Mikkel Svane, the founder of Zendesk, a web-based customer-support service, recently donated $1m to the de Young Museum with the proviso that it must be used to buy contemporary art from local galleries and artists. “It’s like watering your own front garden,” enthuses Ana Teresa Fernández, an artist whose work the museum acquired.

Savvy arts bodies are inviting tech innovators onto their boards and leadership teams. Take SFJAZZ, whose state-of-the-art performance space benefited from a $20m gift from Bob Miner, a co-founder of Oracle. The new chair of its board, Denise Young, is a singer and former Apple executive. Or consider the fundraising campaign for Berkeley Repertory Theatre that has been led by Bruce Golden, a venture capitalist and theatre-lover.

It remains to be seen whether such largesse will endure in a downturn. But one thing is clear: the era in which donors wrote big cheques without measurable results, as the Rockefellers and Guggenheims once did, is passing. Today’s munificent tech entrepreneurs expect to see a return on investment. Ms Gass is sure that institutions such as hers will provide one. The arts, she avers, can “forge civic progress and make the city a better place”. ■