SF ‘startup’ museum a case study in art's relationship with tech

During Dreamforce, trying to see art in downtown San Francisco was almost impossible.

It felt like downtown, which has been beleaguered of late , was the epicenter of a bustling city which, while offering a change of pace, disrupted my schedule. Why, I wondered, don’t people flock downtown for art the way they do for tech conferences?

As long as I’ve worked in the arts in San Francisco, I’ve heard gripes about how the tech sector has negatively impacted the scene. Dealers can’t get techies to buy art. Museums can’t get them to visit. Artists are priced out.

Can the industry that has been blamed for much of the art scene’s dispersal from The City be expected to help salvage it?

A prime case study for this relationship is the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco , which has minted itself as The City’s “startup” museum.

The ICA opened in 2022 at 901 Minnesota St., where the Minnesota Street Project Foundation — the philanthropic project of former Silicon Valley venture capitalist Andy Rappaport and his wife, Deborah — underwrote construction work and a 15-year lease . The initial venture was also backed by a suite of tech funders, including Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and Slack co-founder Cal Henderson, who have since departed from the museum’s board of directors.

The ICA’s board remains populated by individuals from the tech sector and is presently chaired by Ethan Beard , former director of business development at Google and Facebook.

But even with angel investors the ICA, which offers free admission, has had to find ways to cut operating costs.

The ICA recently announced that it will vacate the Dogpatch in October, moving downtown to The Cube at 345 Montgomery St., where it will occupy the subterranean levels of the building in a rent-free agreement with Vornado Realty Trust . The move that will double the museum’s exhibition space.

The otherwise almost all-glass building is part of a complex co-owned by the Trump Organization and on a lender watchlist, which might explain Vornado’s desire to diversify their tenancy portfolio and increase property value to attract other tenants downtown.

“Our relationship is with Vornado,” Beard said. “We’ve had no dealings with the Trump Organization and the Trump Organization will have no influence on what we do at the ICA.”

Ali Gass, founding director of the ICA, wrote in her announcement of the deal that the museum has “embraced ‘startup mode’ — flexibility, creativity, and resilience — as we seek solutions to the very real financial challenges many nonprofits are enduring at this moment.”

In the interest of remaining light on its feet, the museum has no permanent collection, instead exhibiting specially commissioned curatorial projects, and, evidently, no permanent home. The agreement with Vornado is good for another two years, at which point, Beard said, the ICA will reassess.

“Maybe in 2024 what San Francisco really needs is an ICA that’s in a downtown that’s been struggling,” Beard said. “In two years, we’ll ask, ‘What does San Francisco need now?’”

I wonder if this kind of dislocation and decentralization is really the best way to approach art, especially when artists themselves have faced a very stark reality of dislocation as a result of the booming tech industry.

The ICA was only one such venture for the Rappaports, who founded Minnesota Street Project, an art-oriented real-estate investment providing below-market rate rent to art galleries in Dogpatch, in 2016, as an “emergency intervention,” Andy Rappaport said.

“It is true that in San Francisco a lot of the challenges that the arts community faces are a result of the economic effects of the tech business,” Rappaport said. “MSP emanated from the clear realization that it was getting simply too expensive for the arts community to remain in San Francisco. We wanted to try to stem the exodus and provide some hope. And in some sense, it’s my penance for having a successful career in tech.”

Technology and venture capital dominate The City’s economy , whereas the Bay Area Economic Institute pegged the art industry sustaining about 37,000 full-time jobs, sponsored by a mix of private and city funding. Some of the latter comes from tech.

“I think the storyline that tech people don’t support the arts comes from the New York art community, and I think it’s completely off and always has been,” said Todd Hosfelt, director of his eponymous gallery in Dogpatch. “I’ve had lots of clients who work directly in tech and I have even more clients who have made money because of technology.”

On the public side, several local museums benefit directly from tech money. According to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, approximately 24% of the museum’s current trustees come from the tech/venture capital sector. Around 50% are either from the tech sector or have a partner in tech. Similarly, the Asian Art Museum stated that about 16% of its board is in tech, and that that number goes up to about 20% when including major donors.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco — de Young and legion of Honor — chose to not share similar information, but recently received a $1 million donation from Zendesk co-founder Mikkel Svane for the purchase of work by contemporary Bay Area artists to add to their permanent collection. The new acquisitions are currently on display in a three-part exhibition at the de Young .

Throughout San Francisco’s history, artists have activated technology in innovative ways , from Eadweard Muybridge’s invention of the moving image to artists like Lynn Hershman Leeson , who explored early forms of technological innovation. More recently, artists like Jim Campbell, whose background in engineering translated directly into an art career , have helped to define The City’s landscape.

The Bay Area is also home to institutional forums for the intersection of art and tech, such as Leonardo and Gray Area Festival .

“Historically, technological art didn’t have a place in the gallery or the museum,” said Clark Buckner, director of Telematic Media Arts, a South of Market gallery displaying art that intersects technology. “That sort of tension was important. Those art forms have triumphed on the one hand and that technology is so ubiquitous now that that tension has dissipated.”

While both art and tech are defined by a spirit of innovation “there’s a chance that engineers think they’re the true anti-artists,” Buckner said. “But that attitude of disruption goes back to the question of San Francisco as being liberal. There’s a version of liberalism — in the tech economy in particular — that’s really libertarian. And artists who value job security and health care and social services would be the antagonists to that.”

Max Blue is an art critic whose “State of the Arts” column appears monthly in The Examiner.