Why Silicon Valley's young elite won't invest in art

A lot of money is flowing in and out of Bay Area, but it's not going towards art

Walking through the frigid warehouse that housed the inaugural San Francisco edition of the Untitled Art Fair in January, 23-year-old entrepreneur Connor Zwick took in the fair’s 55 contemporary art galleries and was unimpressed.
 
“I look at art all the time and see a lot of art I like,” he said. “But it’s not correlated with price at all.”
 
As he went from booth to booth and was quoted prices ranging from $7,000 for five photographs by the artist Buck Ellison to $42,000 in a different booth for a single, larger photograph by the artist Ori Gersht, his perplexity deepened.

 

“When a $1,000 piece brings me just as much enjoyment as a $30,000 work, I don’t see why I would ever spend $30,000,” he said. “And no, I’m not on a quest to discover why I should spend $30,000 on art.”
 
It would be one thing if he were a casual observer, but Zwick was a potential collector. He’d developed a lucrative flash-card app in high school, which was downloaded more than a million times; once he sold it to online textbook company Chegg, he had financial freedom “for the rest of his life”, he said. Next, Zwick left Harvard at the age of 19 after winning the prestigious Thiel Fellowship, a $100,000 award founded by the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, meant to induce recipients to drop out of college in favour of entrepreneurship.

 
Zwick, in other words, was young, interested, educated, and flush with disposable income — precisely the type of person dealers had come to Untitled to meet.
 
“I was hoping, and still am hoping, to meet a few tech collectors,” said Toby Clarke, the director of London’s Vigo Gallery, a few days after Zwick’s visit. “I thought there would be tech squillionaires, who would need a bit of guidance, which we’re very good at providing.” Clarke said he’d sold out most of his booth — paintings by the highly sought-after artist Daniel Crews-Chubb that ranged from $14,500 to $32,000 — but the sales, he said, were to his existing clients. The point of an art fair, he said, was to meet new ones. “We try to be really friendly, and hopefully we’ll meet one or two,” he said. “But yesterday there was no one.”

 
As the fair wore on, other dealers began to express the same sentiment: The fabled tech mavericks, reputedly bursting with cash and barely out of high school, were not buying art.
 
“Doing this younger fair, we were hoping to meet more people of our generation,” said Hannah Hoffman, the owner of an LA gallery whose booth’s prices ranged from $4,000 to $90,000. “We brought a number of works that we pre-sold, but I feel like we’re not even talking to people [at the fair] who have the potential to buy.”
 
One such person who ultimately stayed away was Ruchi Sanghvi, who was the first female engineer at Facebook (as a product manager there, she came up with the site’s News Feed) and who, after her and her husband’s start-up Cove was acquired by Dropbox, joined the company as vice-president of operations. (She’s since left the position, though her husband, Aditya Agarwal, was recently promoted as Dropbox’s chief technology officer.)