Culture
Russell Yip / Corbis
Apparently, Silicon Valley just doesn’t care much for high culture. Between the startups and venture capital funds, there seems to be little space left for the visual arts, literature and journalism.
“People are more interested in changing the world than having art hanging on their walls,” says Deborah Perry Piscione, author of “Secrets of Silicon Valley,” which examines the values and beliefs of the technology sector. “Art just doesn’t really have a place out here.” The disruptive business ethos of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs is fundamentally at odds with the strict and, as she puts it, “incumbent” thinking of the East Coast establishment. Ellen Gamerman, an arts writer for The Wall Street Journal, is blunter. She refers to the new tech set as “glorified engineering nerds who skipped art history to play with their computers.”
In the past, affluent industries maintained a close relationship with the arts. Many of America’s great cultural institutions were financed by industrialists and tycoons — people with no formal background in the arts, just an excess of wealth. Now, a small group of Silicon Valley Renaissance men is challenging the assumption that there is an untraversable gap between the worlds of high technology and high culture.
The Silicon Valley Contemporary fair, which ran April 10–13, was the art world’s latest effort to tap the technology sector’s vast wealth. The art on show at the fair (much of which integrates technology: graffiti artist KATSU showed canvases created with a spray-can-equipped drone, while the Marina Abramovic Institute presented an interactive artwork that let participants experience “brainwave synchronization”) will be sold through online auctions and open pricing systems inspired by models created in Silicon Valley. Patrons could even buy works using Bitcoin. According to Rick Friedman, 60, the president of the fair’s parent company, the Contemporary will appeal to “the sensibility of the people who work in Silicon Valley.”
Friedman should know about those sensibilities; in his own words, he is “a graduate of Silicon Valley,” a member of a rare subcategory of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who have moved out of the technology sector and into the world of art and culture.
In the 1990s, Friedman ran a series of software and computer science journals and magazines through his company SIGS Publications, which he sold to a venture capital firm. In 2004, using his tech-gotten wealth, Friedman began collecting art. “When I bought my first piece of art,” a Roy Lichtenstein print, for $2,000, “I didn’t sleep for two nights,” he recalled. Friedman has more than 200 paintings in his collection, including works by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Lee Krasner. “Though I remain Rothko-less,” he said wistfully.
While Friedman’s interest in selling art to the tech set is driven by the profit motive, he also wants to share the collecting experience with his peers and make Silicon Valley a power center in the U.S. fine-art scene. “These guys,” says Friedman, referring to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, “have the power to have any voice they want, about any artist, genre or theme.”
He hopes that Silicon Valley’s elite will put down their $22,000 carbon fiber racing bicycles and buy art. In other words, grow up. Indeed, the Silicon Valley senior class already counts several collectors in its ranks. Oracle founder Larry Ellison, 69, has a large collection of Japanese art and a personal art curator; Microsoft’s Paul Allen, 61, was listed in 2009 in a Forbes list of “Top Billionaire Art Collectors”; Google CEO Eric Schmidt, 58, is said to own numerous multimillion-dollar works.
Trevor Traina
Tech entrepreneur turned art collector
But as Noam Schieber recently wrote in The New Republic, “Silicon Valley has become one of the most ageist places in America.” Nobody over 50 is a trend-setter. Enter Trevor Traina. In 1999, the 31-year-old Traina sold his software startup CompareNet to Microsoft for $100 million. He founded three more companies: StepUp, which was purchased for $60 million, DriverSide.com and IfOnly. He was living the dream of any young tech entrepreneur.
Unlike his contemporaries, Traina started buying art, and he has established himself as one of Silicon Valley’s top younger art collectors. He has assembled an enviable body of photographs by 20th and 21st century figures, from Dianne Arbus to Geoff Wall. His most recent acquisition, he says, is an early spot painting by Damien Hirst.
It is no accident that Traina, whose current venture, IfOnly, sells experiences such as “lunch with Mike [Tyson] in Las Vegas,” with a portion of the proceeds going to charity, developed such rarefied tastes. Both his parents were art collectors (his mother, Diane “Dede” Wilsey, an heiress to the Dow Chemical fortune, is president of the board of trustees of the Fine Arts Museums). “Art seeped in around the edges,” he says. By starting his own collection, Traina, who also owns San Francisco’s most expensive house, was returning to his roots.
But Traina is also an activist for the arts. In 2003, he was elected to the board of the Fine Arts Museums. “I went to the first board meeting and thought, ‘There are no young people here,’” he says. And so he inaugurated an annual fundraiser called the Mid-Winter Gala, aimed at “young benefactors” (code for the technology crowd). This year’s gala, a dazzling affair sponsored by Ferragamo, the high-end Italian shoe and leather-goods company, was attended by a whole roster of Silicon Valley heavy hitters, including Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, 38; Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, 50; and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, 36.
Traina acknowledges that there are limits to Silicon Valley’s interest in fine art. “All these friends of mine, they are mostly computer science majors. They work seven days a week, around the clock. They just don’t have time.” Nevertheless, he says, “these are creative, intelligent people. They are artists, too. They have tremendous capacity to appreciate the arts.”
Charles Ferguson
Tech entrepreneur turned Oscar-winning filmmaker
In 2004, Chris Hughes was a sophomore at Harvard pursuing a degree in history and literature. His roommate, a computer science major, was someone named Mark Zuckerberg. Hughes, who had no coding experience, became Facebook’s spokesman. (Unlike his roommate, he did not drop out, and went on to graduate magna cum laude.) He received a 1 percent stake, which, according to Forbes, made him about $600 million when the company made its IPO in 2012. After leaving Facebook, Hughes joined Barack Obama’s presidential campaign as his social media manager, pioneering the use of the Internet to activate support during political campaigns. As Ellen McGirt put it in a cover story on Hughes for Fast Company, “He helped create two of the most successful start-ups in modern history,” Facebook and Obama’s political campaign (specifically, the use of social media in Obama’s political campaign).
When his third startup, Jumo, proved to be less successful than the first two, Hughes did something that no young Silicon Valley entrepreneur had done before: He bought a magazine. In 2012, he purchased The New Republic, a small but well-known politics and culture magazine founded in 1914. Hughes, who is now 30, explains that he had long been a fan of the magazine. “Historically, it has been full of fiery arguments, refined feature writing and earnest criticism, and it embraced politics and culture and put them on the same plane rather than denigrating one to serve the other.”
Unlike Jeff Bezos, who has kept The Washington Post at arm’s length since buying the newspaper in 2013, Hughes became the publisher and editor-in-chief of the D.C.-based magazine. The New Republic is not a side venture; it’s Hughes’ main job. This may seem like an odd move for a youthful technology entrepreneur who probably still has a few big startup ideas left in him. But for Hughes, this is not a business move. “It's my responsibility to make sure it's around for the next 100 years,” he says.
Though Hughes maintains that his role at The New Republic is not a technology job, his Silicon Valley background is definitely visible in the refurbished magazine, which is now optimized for mobile and tablet use. Even so, the mission of the magazine remains largely unchanged. “We’re not in the business of creating shiny tech tools that come and go,” he says. Instead, the magazine’s task is in “shaping the conversation about some of the most important issues of our age.”
Hughes, who grew up in a small town in North Carolina, can almost come across as old-fashioned when he makes his stirring defense of long-form journalism and rigorous public discourse. In this way, he takes after Charles Ferguson, one of Silicon Valley’s original Renaissance men.
Like Traina, Ferguson sold his software company, Vermeer Technologies, to Microsoft, for $133 million in 1996. Since cashing out, he has become a fiery journalist, author and filmmaker, taking aim at government incompetence, financial crime and inequality. To date, he has written four books and directed two feature documentaries: “No End in Sight,” about the botched invasion and occupation of Iraq, and “Inside Job,” which examined the causes of the financial crisis. When he won an Academy Award for “Inside Job,” Ferguson used his acceptance speech to leverage his message: “Three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail,” he said, “and that's wrong.” Ferguson has effectively channeled his money, intellect and contacts into an art form that, he hopes, will effect real change. “I view my function as policy analysis and investigative journalism,” he told Charlie Rose in an interview.
The idea that civil society still needs people like Hughes and Ferguson is not the prevailing wisdom in Silicon Valley, whose response to the shifting nature of the news industry is Circa, a mobile news app that condenses current events into short, bullet-pointed paragraphs (the company’s motto is “Save time, stay informed”). But Hughes believes that the gap between the attitudes of Silicon Valley and the philosophy of an institution such as The New Republic isn’t unbridgeable. As more entrepreneurs follow in the footsteps of Ferguson, Hughes and Traina, bringing their significant wealth with them, these worlds will become increasingly dependent on each other.
“Silicon Valley builds apps and platforms and changes how we learn and interact,” says Hughes. The New Republic, he says, is “in the business of ideas and helping our readers learn, discuss and engage the questions of our time. These are both important and necessary projects for an innovative, reflective polity.”
Meanwhile, the art world is waiting apprehensively to see whether Rick Friedman’s bet will pay off. While there’s no shortage of skeptics, Trevor Traina believes that Silicon Valley Contemporary just may have history on its side. “You can go back to Roman emperors raiding Egypt. The merchants of the Renaissance. The robber barons,” he says. “The history of mankind is one of people achieving affluence and then acquiring art. It’s inevitable.”
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