California Dreaming
There’s a shockingly misinformed review of the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the Weekend FT. The article, Westward, look, the land is bright (the title taken from a line in an an obscure 19th century poem) is written by the cosmopolitan architect Thomas Sevcik. While I can’t comment on his claims about the overall quality of the art on display in the new museum, or quibble with the cultural shift to the West Coast from the East in the U.S., there’s no way to overlook the ridiculousness of four of his ideas.
The end of art fairs
Sevcik anticipates the time when ‘the West Coast-driven digitalisation of the art market makes art fairs obsolete’. Despite initiatives such as the Google Art Project, to properly appreciate art you still have to be able to eyeball it up close. Buyers and sellers like to sip wine and be seduced by expensive art in a face-to-face setting. Despite the success of Amazon, people still attend the Franfurt Book Fair and flock to Hay-on-Wye. A couple of years back, Jan Dalley wrote in the FT on the paradox of performance: despite digialization people still like to meet in person.
You need a humanities education to collect art
Central to Sevcik’s article is the power of money to influence art. The fact that the highlights of SFMOMA were gifted by the founders of the Gap clothing stores is consigned to a sidebar. Sevcik wonders if the titans of tech will buy art, in contrast to the East Coast plutocracy that included bankers who ‘collected art because many of them had a humanities education’. Perhaps these guys did take a few art history classes on their way to economics, finance and accounting degrees. But that does not mean everyone with a tech fortune studies nothing by computer science in college. Steve Jobs famously audited calligraphy classes at Reed College. Many of the most successful (Ellison, Zuckerberg, Gates) never actually finished college. When not collecting racing yachts Oracle’s Larry Ellison has an appreciation for Japanese art and culture.
The media is based in LA
Throughout the article, Sevcik conflates Los Angles, San Francisco and Seattle. At times he talks about the “West Coast” as a whole. Then he gets it spectacularly wrong on LA:
Most of the TV series we like so much, and virtually all globally relevant movies, are invented, written, developed and managed in Los Angeles.
Don’t tell this to Woody Allen or the Coen Brothers, the people of Michigan or Louisiana. Indeed, it’s been noted that Hollywood continues to flee California at an alarming rate.
We’re all about to become polygamists
OK, up to now the article has made some points that can be argued either way (maybe a majority of media does originate in LA; perhaps, given their wealth, tech titans don’t invest in as much art as others; and Bill Gates’ Seattle mansion does have digitized art on display) but in assessing the current ‘West Coast lifestyle’ Sevcik goes completely off the rails:
New West Coast lifestyle ideas, from questions about robots, cyborgs and space travel, to the legalization of polygamy (soon to come?)…
Say what?
I can only suspect this is either a wishful Freudian slip on the part of the author, or a typo on the part of an FT editor smoking the substance whose legalization might soon come but has nothing to do with outdated Mormon marriage practices.
1 Comment so far
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A very interesting insight on the role of college Education and the place of Humanities in the digital age.
By Elizabeth on 06.02.16 5:41 am
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