"The New High-Tech Patrons" @wsj - George Lindemann

Tech entrepreneurs are starting to peer out from their hoodies and explore the art world, and dealers and museum boards couldn't be more thrilled. WSJ's Ellen Gamerman joins Lunch Break with a look at the new players, and the culture clash it's setting up with Wall Street's elite. Photo: Getty Images.

Next week, San Francisco will unveil a major public art installation using 25,000 energy-efficient lights to illuminate the city's Bay Bridge in countless abstract combinations.

The Bay Lights, set to run every night for the next two years, will also spotlight a new role for the area's tech entrepreneurs: patrons of the arts.

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Winni Wintermeyer for The Wall Street Journal

BETA TESTING Leo Villareal, a tech-world favorite, with his computer-assisted light sculpture that will illuminate San Francisco's Bay Bridge in abstract patterns every night for the next two years.

Created by artist Leo Villareal, the $8 million computer-assisted light sculpture has been financed by some high-profile tech donors including Yahoo YHOO +2.86%CEO Marissa Mayer and Internet power couple Mark and Alison Pincus. Mr. Villareal, who designed the bridge's light patterns using software he created, is also emblematic of a new breed of artist that is especially attractive to wealthy technology executives. A former researcher at Microsoft MSFT +0.61%co-founder Paul Allen's think tank in the early 1990s, Mr. Villareal weaves that tech background into his work.

"This was a whole I.T. job, which you wouldn't associate with a monumental piece of public art," Mr. Villareal said one chilly evening on a San Francisco pier as he tested the work with his laptop. Every time he stabbed at the keyboard through a hole in his glove, the lights rearranged across the bridge.

Around San Francisco, tech entrepreneurs who spent years building businesses and accumulating wealth are starting to peer out from under their hoodies and explore the art world. As the Internet industry matures, the people who helped make it happen are having children, buying houses and taking tentative steps into philanthropy—and now the art world. It's a lucrative emerging market that is gaining the attention of museums, dealers, consultants and other art-world heavyweights.

"Art comes between buying the Ferrari and getting the kids into college," said New York mega-dealer Larry Gagosian, who added that he sees "tremendous potential" from tech entrepreneurs as they grow older.

As they have with risky and fast-growing startups, the new tech players are putting a distinctive spin on the art scene—both in the type of work they collect and the low-profile way they acquire it. Many tech collectors exploring the market, for instance, are seduced by works with a digital twist.

"An engineer will look at a photograph or video art in a way a banker couldn't—we think in ones and zeros, we think in terms of screens," said Trevor Traina, a 44-year-old collector of photography who sold his first tech company to Microsoft for more than $100 million.

Unlike on Wall Street, where a trophy canvas can work as a passport to highflying social circles, flaunting isn't part of the tech culture. "If you saw these people, you'd never guess that they have money—it's all about just being cool," said San Francisco dealer Chris Perez, who works with about 20 tech clients.image

Simon Upton/The Interior Archive

Trevor Traina, who sold his first company to Microsoft for more than $100 million, is amassing a major photo collection.

Two years ago, as a service largely to its growing base of tech clients, Christie's began shipping artworks to San Francisco ahead of the major modern and contemporary art sales, said Ellanor Notides, who runs the Christie's San Francisco office. She said tech clients are chasing pieces by market darlings like Gerhard Richter, whose work sold for more than $34 million at Sotheby's last year.

Lately, some art insiders have been buzzing that the wife of Google co-founder Larry Page, Lucinda Southworth, is starting to buy art. (A Google spokeswoman said the company doesn't comment on executives' personal endeavors.) Tech entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen collects—including works by Robert Rauschenberg—as do tech venture capitalists Matt Cohler, who favors contemporary photography, and Jim Breyer, who owns pieces by emerging artists in China and Brazil.

Mr. Breyer, a board member of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, finds parallels between art and startups. He loves taking a chance on lesser-known talent and often visits galleries while traveling abroad on business. He particularly admires artists like Picasso who show the capacity to reinvent themselves. "It's a personal characteristic not only of the artists I gravitate to but the entrepreneurs," he said. (Mr. Breyer sits on the board of News Corp NWSA +1.04%., which publishes The Wall Street Journal.)

The new collectors' interests sometimes contrast with the more traditional tastes of tech pioneers before them: Oracle ORCL +1.18%CEO Larry Ellison buys centuries-old Japanese art. Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang hunts for leading examples of Chinese calligraphy. Microsoft's Mr. Allen collects masterpieces by blue-chip artists like van Gogh and Mark Rothko.

Now San Francisco museums are stepping up their pursuit of the tech industry, particularly as companies like Twitter, Pinterest and Dropbox settle in new offices in the city rather than Silicon Valley.

Mr. Traina, the Internet entrepreneur, loaned his impressive photography collection for a show at the city's de Young Museum last year. Dave Morin, an early Facebook FB +2.68%employee who is now CEO and co-founder of the private social network Path, just joined the board of SFMOMA.

Since 2010, SFMOMA has brought on 12 new trustees—at least half from the tech community, according to museum deputy director of external affairs Robert Lasher. He added that in addition to donating money and loaning artworks, tech contributors are helping retool the institution's digital strategy and guide the museum to a more global role in a nearly $555 million expansion.

Next week, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's annual Mid-Winter Gala is expected to be populated by a number of tech-world all-stars. Yahoo's Ms. Mayer bought a table while Apple lead designer Jonathan Ive is expected to come as well. Organizers are hoping for the return of past attendees like Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman.

 

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Ligorano/Reese/Catharine Clark Gallery/Nora Ligorano (photo)

Tech collectors chase works like Ligorano/Reese's fiber optic tapestry.

From her glass-walled office at Web retailer One Kings Lane, co-founder Alison Pincus has been working her contacts for San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum, which recruited her for its board last year. At her company's headquarters, which sits in the same San Francisco building as Twitter and Yammer, the Givenchy-and-Balenciaga-clad Ms. Pincus described going to last year's TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., with a mission: to convince friend and fellow art collector David Krane, a general partner at Google Ventures, GOOG +0.60%to join the museum's board.

She succeeded.

Ms. Pincus, whose husband, Mark, is founder and CEO of the social-gaming company Zynga, ZNGA +1.63%also lends the museum her expertise. The 38-year-old mother of two is helping revamp the museum store, where the home page now showcases little more than a small mezuza. The shop needs "bespoke products," a sleeker website and items not limited to Jewish themes, she said.

As art and tech circles overlap more frequently, a cottage industry of dealers and specialized consultants has sprung up to offer advice. San Francisco art adviser Sabrina Buell is a Stanford graduate and former New York gallery director who helps tech honchos—some of them old college pals—begin collecting art.

The 36-year-old San Francisco native meets clients in her downtown office, with its high ceilings and exposed ductwork, first asking them broad questions about their tastes—abstract or figurative? color or muted? Then she goes analog, loading them up with resource books and catalogs. "I like people to look at a thousand things before they buy one," said Ms. Buell.

Her clients tend to avoid status symbols. "If you're young and you walk into someone's house and see a Picasso, it would be like, 'Whoa'—just because you have the capacity, you don't have to buy the most expensive things," she said. Still, her clients often get blue-ribbon treatment, with galleries and auction houses sending art directly to their homes so they can see the art up close while mulling a purchase.

Ms. Buell, whose great uncle is Napa vintner Robert Mondavi, bought her first work of art when she was 15, a Michael Kenna photograph she had written about for an English class. Today she fills the loft she shares with her partner, industrial designer Yves Behar, with edgy contemporary works. Ms. Buell and her colleague, Mary Zlot, trade in discretion: Zlot Buell + Associates doesn't even have a website.

Despite the stepped-up activity, some art dealers still bemoan what they call the indifference of the tech world and write off tech billionaires as glorified engineering nerds who skipped art history to play with their computers.

Others see a shift happening, thanks in part to the booming art market. "It once was a very culturally vapid community, but it's become incredibly rich lately," said Adam Sheffer, a partner at the New York gallery Cheim & Read. "I think people are coming to realize fine art has come to be worth something."

Dealers who work with tech clients are protective of them, wary of a culture clash with snooty art climbers. When a tech entrepreneur who favors Patagonia jackets and sneakers told San Francisco dealer Claudia Altman-Siegel he was headed to the Swiss art fair Art Basel, she had some advice: "I was like, 'No one's going to be nice to you if you're not dressed up,'" she said.

Then again, relative anonymity can be a plus. San Francisco tech investor Art Berliner, managing director of Walden Venture Capital, said when he walks into certain New York galleries he rarely gets the hard sell—or any sell at all—because most people don't know who he is.

Mr. Berliner, whose eclectic collection includes work by Israeli artist Michal Rovner, keeps some of his pieces in his office. He said his artwork helps set a creative tone and soothe nerves when entrepreneurs come to pitch their businesses: "Having art around does make the scene less intimidating."

Apple senior director Jeffrey Dauber owns a $50,000 video work by artist Lincoln Schatz that features layered video images of Mr. Dauber engaging in his morning ritual—including a shot of him pulling down his pants. The voyeurism resonates with a man whose industry helped redefine the idea of privacy.

"The thing about being in tech is, I have no illusions—I know we're being watched," said Mr. Dauber, who keeps his extensive art collection in its own house in San Francisco.

Dick Kramlich, an early pioneer in the tech venture capital scene, plans next year to open a private museum of new media art—which includes video, film and computer-assisted installations—in a Napa Valley building designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the architecture firm behind Beijing's Bird's Nest and the Tate Modern in London. The 77-year-old chairman and co-founder of New Enterprise Associates said the collection's tech orientation was his wife's idea: "She said, 'Look, you're going down to Silicon Valley every day, I think if I did something in this area it might be of interest to you,'" he said.

Internet entrepreneur Mr. Traina, who recently launched a new startup called IfOnly.com, now has 300 master works of photography on the six floors of his mansion in San Francisco's Pacific Heights. During a recent tour, walking by a room wallpapered in peacock feathers, he pointed out classics by Diane Arbus (Mr. Traina bought one of her iconic photographs of identical twins for just under $500,000 at Sotheby's in 2004) and contemporary works like a Doug Rickard photograph of a computer screen showing a Google Street View of a depressed city neighborhood.

Raised in a moneyed family among art lovers—his father had a world-class collection of Fabergé cigarette cases—Mr. Traina promotes the art world to his tech buddies. He organized the Mid-Winter Gala for the Fine Arts Museums in part to lure a "farm team" of young donors and future board members. Trustees now include Zachary Bogue, a tech investor married to Yahoo's Ms. Mayer, an SFMOMA board member.

The institution returns the favor by opening up singular experiences to Mr. Traina, who recalls a trip to the Netherlands he once took with fellow board members. Early one morning, he was allowed to visit an Amsterdam museum while it was still closed. "This very nice woman left me alone in a room with five Vermeers," he said. "I realized the power great art can have."

Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com

"Why Arts Managers Short of Cash Are Looking at Detroit" in @wsj Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr

By Terry Teachout
August 17, 2012

When it comes to the fine arts, things are really, really rough all over. Yet another major regional orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony, is now publicly grappling with a debt crisis (it’s nearly $20 million in the hole) exacerbated by high labor costs that threaten the ensemble’s existence. The situation, says the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is “increasingly dire.” Meanwhile, a growing number of much-admired performing groups, including Palm Beach’s Florida Stage, have been forced to shut down permanently, while others, most notably the New York City Opera, have chosen instead to gut their operations to the point of unrecognizability.

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Associated Press
A viewer at a current Detroit Institute of Arts exhibition, ‘Picasso and Matisse: The DIA’s Prints and Drawings.’

That’s why everybody in the art world is now talking about the Detroit Institute of Arts, a world-class institution that just came within inches of closing. Instead, it’s now more financially stable than at any time in the past quarter-century.

The DIA, as Judith H. Dobrzynski recently reported in the Journal, no longer receives public funding from the city of Detroit or the state of Michigan, both of which have been hit brutally hard by the current economic downturn. Because the museum’s operating endowment is so small, more than half of its operating expenses are directly funded by its donors—a model that, as Ms. Dobrzynski wrote, “is simply not sustainable.” DIA director Graham Beal responded by hacking away at the museum’s budget and raising enough money to retire its current debt. But he knew that the DIA was doing no better than running in place, and that the fiscal road ahead would soon grow sharply steeper.

What to do? Mr. Beal went to the voters, asking the residents of Michigan’s Macomb, Oakland and Wayne counties to pass a modest 10-year-long dedicated property-tax increase known as a “millage.” It would supply up to $23 million in public funding each year for the next decade—91% of the DIA’s annual operating budget—thus buying time for Mr. Beal and his colleagues to build up the museum’s operating endowment to the point where it can bring in sufficient income to pay the bills.

Sounds great, huh? But how do you get suburban taxpayers to pony up in support of a museum located in the heart of a city on which most of them long ago turned their backs? That’s the beauty part: Mr. Beal announced that the residents of every county that passed the millage would be admitted free to the DIA. Otherwise, he said, the museum would be forced to close on weekdays and lock the doors to half of its galleries.

Having offered voters this stark alternative, Mr. Beal and his staffers rolled up their sleeves and started working the phones … and all three counties passed the millage.

What lessons can other arts organizations learn from the DIA crisis? To begin with, the DIA showed it was serious about money by slashing every thimbleful of fat out of its budget. It simultaneously showed itself to be responsive to the wishes of its patrons by undertaking an imaginative reinstallation of the museum’s permanent collection that was both user-friendly and artistically responsible. Then, when the DIA asked for public funding, it sweetened the pill with an equally imaginative free-admission plan that targeted not just Detroiters but local suburbanites.

Contrast the DIA’s approach with that of the Atlanta Symphony, which is opting for innovation-free budget cutting instead of root-and-branch institutional transformation. Or the New York City Opera, which has “transformed” itself into a mini-NYCO that has as much in common with the old company as today’s pre-shrunk Newsweek has with the once-healthy magazine of a quarter-century ago. Cutting is not enough. You also have to think creatively and be willing to take risks, as the DIA did when it asked the people of Detroit and its suburbs to agree to a tax increase.

Yes, Mr. Beal’s three-legged plan was museum-specific, especially the free-admission leg. But the thinking behind it has universal applicability. To wit:

• Don’t ask the public for more money unless you can prove that you’re not wasting the money you’re already spending.

• Keep the needs of your clientele in mind at all times.

• When the world changes, change with it.

That last commandment is the toughest to embrace, as well as the most important. Symphony orchestras and theater companies, for example, continue to cling to the old-fashioned subscription model that provides them with a yearly cushion of “front money.” But a fast-growing number of under-50 Americans are too busy to commit in advance to attending specific performances on specific dates. According to the Theatre Communications Group, the number of subscription tickets sold by America’s nonprofit theaters plummeted 15.1% between 2006 and 2010. That’s not a trend—it’s an avalanche.

No arts organization, however important it may be, is entitled to succeed. It must keep on proving its worth to the public, year after year. But Mr. Beal and his colleagues have clearly accepted the iron necessity of finding creative new ways to engage in the business of high art. As a result, they now have a shot at long-term survival—and they’ve earned it.

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"Suburban Taxpayers Vote to Support Detroit Museum" in @nytimes

August 8, 2012
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Paul Sancya/Associated Press
Property taxes are now part of the museum’s revenue.

The Detroit Institute of Arts was saved from devastating budget cuts Tuesday night after voters in three Michigan counties agreed to institute a property tax increase earmarked specifically for the museum.

The levy — known as a millage tax — is expected to raise $23 million a year and put the arts institute on secure financial footing for the first time in two decades. In exchange residents of the contributing counties — Wayne (which includes Detroit) and its suburban neighbors Macomb and Oakland — will receive free museum admission. The new funds will also support extra programming for older visitors and students, and expand operating hours.

“We are thrilled,” said Graham W. J. Beal, the institute’s director, who gathered with supporters at the museum Tuesday night to await the count and then celebrate the proposal’s passage.

The institute now becomes one of a handful of American museums, including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the St. Louis Art Museum, that rely on property taxes for a portion of their revenues. But Detroit’s is unusual among major urban museums because it does not have a large endowment and receives no financial support from either the city or the state.

As a result the museum’s leaders felt they had to ask taxpayers if they would be willing to pay to support its mission. Though they answered yes, Christine Anagnos, executive director of the Association of Art Museum Directors, said Tuesday night’s vote does not presage broader change. “I think Detroit is a special situation,” she said, referring to the complete withdrawal of government funds. “I don’t think this is a trend.”

The institute’s holdings range from ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman artifacts to contemporary American masterpieces. But starting two decades ago both Michigan and the city of Detroit began withdrawing their financial support, and neither money drawn from the institution’s endowment or operating revenues could keep pace. Admissions and food and merchandise sales generate about $3.5 million a year, or just 15 percent of the annual budget.

Last month The Detroit Free Press noted that all of the city’s cultural institutions have traditionally been underendowed and suggested that was possibly a side effect of the “new-model mentality of the auto industry,” which encouraged yearly rather than long-term donations.

The institute underwent a major renovation in 2007 only to experience a severe round of cutbacks two years later, when it reduced its operating budget from $34 million to $25.4 million and eliminated more than 60 full- and part-time positions, or nearly 20 percent of its work force.

The millage tax takes advantage of the fact that the vast majority of the institute’s 400,000 yearly visitors — 79 percent — live in one of the three counties. The 0.2-mill tax will last for 10 years and will cost each homeowner approximately $15 a year for every $150,000 of a home’s fair market value, according to a fact sheet put out by the arts institute. A designated tax to support the Detroit Zoo was approved by county voters in 2008.

Kaywin Feldman, the director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, which receives 42 percent of its budget from a similar property tax in Hennepin County, said the millage “has been a part of the story of the success of the museum all along.”

In St. Louis the Metropolitan Zoological Park and Museum District supports five institutions. “This is a firm commitment from taxpayers, and is much more stable,” said J. Patrick Dougherty, the district’s executive director. He said the millage tax there has escaped the sort of anti-tax opposition found elsewhere.

Over the next decade the Detroit Institute of Arts will focus on building its $98 million endowment to $400 million, a goal museum officials concede is ambitious, particularly given the uncertain state of the economy.

The museum, which raised $2.5 million to campaign for the tax, emphasized the economic benefits, noting that the institute spent more than $7 million on goods and services in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb Counties last year.

The city technically owns the institute’s Beaux-Arts building and more than 60,000-piece collection, which includes Diego Rivera’s monumental frescoes, and works by Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder, Rembrandt, Rubens, Monet, Cezanne, van Gogh, Munch and more. In handouts museum officials noted that selling art to support operating costs violates accepted museum practices. The city is also prohibited from selling any part of the collection.

Pam Marcil, the institute’s director of public relations, said the museum expects to see proceeds from the new tax in January.

On Wednesday morning Mr. Beal said that the museum was immediately fulfilling its pledge to offer county residents free entry. He invited them over to see the museum’s current exhibition of works by Picasso and Matisse, and glimpse a rare Vermeer, “Woman Holding a Balance,” on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington.