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

By Carlos Suarez De Jesus
published: August 09, 2012

Carlos Gámez de Francisco's Glasses for Face Shape and French Mustache

In part, that's because collectors tend to flee the 305 as the mercury soars. But it's also because August gives galleries a chance to prep for the big season openings in September, when they crack out the big cannons in anticipation of December's Art Basel and its satellite fairs.

That doesn't mean you won't find some fresh exhibits worth visiting this weekend, though — all with the bonus of snagging a parking space more easily than you would on the average Second Saturday. For galleries that brave the August lull, it can be the perfect time to command eyeballs in a relaxing environment.

"There might be fewer collectors here for the summer, but we still have visitors coming to learn, enjoy, or just satisfy their curiosity," says Elaine Minionis, co-owner of the Lunch Box Gallery, which will be open this weekend. "We've all worked so hard to build the reputation of this area in relation to art content. Where does that go when newcomers visit and they find almost everything closed? It's a waste of opportunity."

Fortunately, a trio of shows — including one at Minionis's gallery — represents anything but a blown chance. Among the best offerings opening at 6 p.m. Saturday are a conceptual duo exploring third-wave feminism, a sprawling photography show featuring the work of 14 international artists, and a solo exhibit by a young Cuban painter whose vision of the French monarchy's waning days offers scathing commentary on absolute power.

With the presidential election season rising to a boil that's hot enough to match the blistering North Miami Avenue asphalt, the Magic City's premier alternative art space features two artists drawing inspiration from a Republican blowhard.

"Female Hu$tle," a collaborative project by Heather Miller and Rosemarie Romero at ­Locust Projects (3852 N. Miami Ave..; 305-576-8570; locustprojects.org), was created partially in response to the furor that erupted earlier this year when Rush Limbaugh called Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute" after she testified about contraception before a congressional committee.

Miller and Romero, both MFA students at the University of Florida, write that they want to "explore a complex and contradictory dialogue about objectification and identity." To that end, Romero's Porn Nails is an actual nail salon in the gallery, where the artist offers custom manicures for women and girls "in exchange for conversations in relation to love, sex, and work specific to the geographic region of South Florida."

Romero says she wants to explore female stereotypes by employing camp and parody to transform negative labels of women into positive ones.

"I'm Dominican, so I will be performing as a Latin nail manicurist named Chichi and will be in the gallery on roller skates and wearing a platinum wig," she says. "I will be playing with the whole idea of the 'Miami girl' image in a beauty-parlor setting, making cafecitos and cortaditos on a hotplate for my clients."

The artist, who grew up here and often skated to Miami booty bass tunes at Thunder Wheels in Kendall, says Limbaugh's comments where offensive and hurtful; the project is also a way for others hurt by such language to reclaim the insults.

"I felt for her," Romero recalls. "After I finish giving participants their manicures, I will be taking portraits of them with a Polaroid for a large wall collage created as part of the project. They can then write the words bitch, slut, or other phrases on their pictures to reclaim negative female stereotypes as words of empowerment or pleasure."

Miller, meanwhile, has taken over the front gallery and storefront windows facing North Miami Avenue to present Gold/Mirror, a series of human-size sculptural/photographic works depicting female bodies painted gold, with their absent faces replaced by mirrors. Phrases such as "I will not become fettered to the role that you assign me" and "I will live with intention" cover the floor around the exhibit.

The work explores objectification as a means of empowerment and challenges feminist stereotypes, Miller says. "I use my body as bait to draw the viewer into my work. I create objects that transform the body in order to counteract the gaze. The sculptures are both retaliatory and celebratory," she explains.

For a compelling photo-based show that would command attention any time of year, visit the Lunch Box Gallery (310 NW 24th St., Miami; 305-407-8131; thelunchboxgallery.com), where "Summer Photo Show 2012" features scores of stunning images from 14 international artists.

Now in its second annual edition, the exhibit includes entries from all styles of the genre, including mixed-media works employing photography. On view is everything from conceptual and documentary photography to narrative photography, photo essay, iPhoneography, and photo collage.

Look for Noah David Bau's portraits of young professional muay thai boxers at a training camp in Bangkok's most notorious slum. In works that are at once searing and compelling, the Boston artist captures images of boys who have been orphaned or discarded, subjected to grueling workouts and brutal physical punishment, and trained to be merciless.

Another artist worth attention is Miami's Lissette Schaeffler, who focuses her lens on the Magic City's seedy hot-sheet motels. For her By the Hour series, she snaps haunting photos of empty pay-by-the-hour sex dives, inviting viewers to an encounter with the sordid landscapes of the illicit quickie rendezvous.

"The show we had for the summer in 2011 was highly crowded," Minionis says. "There is no excuse for not putting on a show — or even more, a good show — because it's summer... Besides, our particular purpose is not only about selling but also about educating people about the art form and its latest trends, bringing a deeper appreciation."

At Hardcore Art Contemporary Space (72 NW 25th St., Miami; 305-576-1645; hardcoreartmiami.com), a visually striking solo show by young Cuban painter Carlos Gámez de Francisco appropriates the opulence and decadence of the last French monarchs while referencing his life in Cuba during the island's "Special Period," the economic crisis that followed the fall of the Soviet Union.

Curated by the Aluna Curatorial Collective, Adriana Herrera, and Willy Castellanos, the exhibit, titled "Radical Genealogy: The Decline of Dauphins, Courtesans, and Hounds," features animations, paintings, and drawings that aim to explore "the relationship between the Eros of power and the threat of destruction." On view are provocative, richly textured images of a stuck-up Robespierre, the last words of Louis XVI, and Marie Antoinette on the way to the guillotine.

Herrera, who is also an independent curator and an art critic for El Nuevo Herald, says, "Black humor serves as the narrative thread linking pictorial scenes in which the bloody and the absurd converge in ostentatious fashion."