The George Lindemann Journal by 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.

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.

 

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

If I were to tell you that a small, economically depressed Mohawk Valley village, about 200 miles northwest of New York, is home to a museum rich in significant works by 18th- to early 20th-century American luminaries such as Gilbert Stuart, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins and George Bellows, you’d probably say, as I did, “Who knew?”

The Arkell Museum at Canajoharie has now become somewhat less obscure, thanks to its loan of nine paintings—by William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam and Theodore Robinson, among others—to this summer’s popular “American Impressionism: Paintings of Light and Life” exhibition at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, about 30 miles away.

The sparsely attended Arkell recently saw an uptick in visitors thanks to this Cooperstown exposure, according to Diane Forsberg, its director and chief curator. Ms. Forsberg hopes that the recent spurt of interest in the Arkell may help her attract desperately needed financial support for a shoestring operation whose annual budget last year was down 45% from 2008. The museum currently lacks both a registrar and an education curator.

A precursor to the corporate art collections that flourished during the late 20th century, the museum opened in 1927 as the Canajoharie Gallery, established by Bartlett Arkell, founder and first president of the Beech-Nut Packing Co. (later Beech-Nut Nutrition Corp.). Arkell “did not use his collection to bolster his position in society,” according to Ms. Forsberg, and didn’t want his name on the gallery. (That happened after a 2007 expansion, 61 years after his death.) His intent, she said, was to create a refuge “filled with inspirational art that his Beech-Nut workers and all Canajoharie residents would view as their own.”

He also collected for a more pragmatic purpose—to promote his company’s products and the attractiveness of its rustic locale: After he purchased J.G. Brown’s “American Farmer” (1908), in the mistaken belief that it represented a Mohawk Valley landscape, Beech-Nut’s marketing department adapted the painting’s idealized image of a farmer leaning on a pitchfork, accompanied by his alert dog, for use in a gum advertisement that touted Canajoharie as “Flavor-Town.”

But last year the food company abandoned its longtime home for a new plant further east on the Mohawk River. Located across the street from the Arkell, the white-walled former Beech-Nut factory is a white elephant with a “For Sale” sign. “The Mohawk Valley is littered with empty manufacturing plants,” lamented the Arkell’s president, Charles Tallent, who does triple duty as the president of the adjoining local library and attorney for the village.

The Arkell’s financial footing was undermined by a 2006 flood that caused some $1.4 million in damage, fortunately sparing its art but creating a net loss of $375,000 after federal disaster aid and insurance reimbursements. The 2008 recession hit just after an $11 million expansion that added a large event space, two changing-exhibition galleries and office and storage space, but also higher operating costs. The museum is still paying off its construction debt. Desperate for income, it recently stopped offering free admission to visitors who are cardholders at the local library, which shares both the museum’s building and its governing board.

Like many recession-hit museums, the Arkell has coped by organizing temporary exhibitions from its own 480-piece permanent collection, supplemented by works from the local Arkell Hall Foundation, established by Bartlett Arkell’s sister. (The foundation lent three works of its own to the Fenimore show.) On view through Oct. 21 is an engaging display of American Impressionist watercolors and pastels, intended to complement the Cooperstown exhibition. Highlights include Mary Cassatt’s deftly sketched pastel “Portrait of Mathilde Valet” (c. 1890) and Childe Hassam’s luminous “Brush House” (1902), a pastel that shimmers and nearly dissolves in the sunlight.

The show also features a charming harvest scene, “The Pumpkin Patch” (1878), from the Arkell’s cache of 21 works by Winslow Homer. The museum is lending a tempestuous winter coastal view, “Watching the Breakers: A High Sea” (1896), to the Portland Museum of Art’s “Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine” (Sept. 22 through Dec. 30). And the Arkell hopes to mount its own Homer exhibition in 2014, in partnership with the Fenimore (which will show it first), culled from its deep collection and enriched by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s possible loan of a watercolor, “Inside the Bar” (1883), that was purchased by Bartlett Arkell and donated to the Met by his widow.

Also on view (through Jan. 5) is “Pastoral and Parkland: American Landscape Paintings,” which prominently features one of Ms. Forsberg’s favorites—George Inness’s “The Passing Shower” (c. 1860-68), a sweeping, idyllic landscape crowned by a double rainbow and gazed upon by an indolent shepherd, reclining on a grassy slope.

But for me, the most riveting display was neither of the enjoyable but qualitatively uneven temporary exhibitions. The unexpected richness of the Arkell’s collection is best appreciated in the densely hung, sky-lit, vault-ceilinged exhibition hall that formed the core of the original museum.

I was immediately arrested by a Gilbert Stuart portrait—not the Arkell’s “George Washington,” painted about 1820 (one of Stuart’s many copies of the dollar-bill image), but “Mrs. Thomas Bisse” (c. 1785), a symphony of sumptuously textured textiles, topped by a voluminous, gauzy bonnet that seemed incongruously elegant for this plain-faced matron.

An austerely attired gallery neighbor of the showy Mrs. Bisse is the austerely dressed “Portrait of Mrs. Stokes” (1903), the forthright, no-nonsense mother of the artist Thomas Eakins’s former pupil, Frank. The son deemed it a “good work, not a good likeness”—a critique often leveled at Eakins. At least this unflattering, mannish portrait survived. Eakins biographer Henry Adams wrote that the artist “gave a portrait of … Frank W. Stokes to his family, who destroyed it.”

Bartlett Arkell was drawn not only to the psychological acuity of portraiture and the soothing prettiness of American Impressionism but also to the gritty realism of the Ashcan School. Clustered together in the grand gallery are works by George Bellows, Robert Henri and George Luks. Like the bulk of Arkell’s purchases, these came from the now defunct Macbeth Gallery in New York, which specialized in American art and pioneered in exhibiting the Ashcan School’s unsparing portrayals of urban life.

In the midst of this improbable bounty, usurping an entire wall at the far end of the gallery, is a full-size copy of Rembrandt’s best-known masterwork, “The Night Watch,” which Arkell commissioned after having admired the original in the Rijksmuseum. “He wanted people to see what he had experienced when he went to Europe,” Ms. Forsberg explained. All but one other of the Arkell’s 21 Old Master knock-offs by copyist Martin Kopershoek were destroyed in the 2006 flood. (Most of the museum’s original art was, luckily, stored off-site during the expansion’s construction.)

The challenge now is to entice art lovers to experience these out-of-the-way riches firsthand. Ms. Forsberg dreams of teaming up with other art museums in the region—the Munson-Williams-Proctor Museum in Utica and the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse—to collaborate on cultural tourism.

“We need to let people know that this is a place to go when they’re on vacation,” Ms. Forsberg said wistfully.

-By LEE ROSENBAUM