The Guardian took a tour of the new SF MoMA and came away impressed with the way the Fisher collection has transformed the museum. But lurking behind the scenes is another story. Two of the San Francisco area’s great collections now available to the public—the Andersons’ at Stanford and the Fishers’ at SFMoMA—collecting leadership is moving away from retail and services fortunes toward wealth generated from virtual companies.
Here’s the Guardian paying particular attention to a surprise guest at the opening:
SoMa, in which the museum stands: as recently as the early 90s it was, Benezra points out, “not a place where polite company would go looking for culture. Today it is one of the centres of the tech industry, dynamic and lively.” Another aspect is the availability of great wealth. “Entrepreneurship is a big thing in San Francisco, and the visual arts are particularly amenable to it,” investment mogul and chair of the SFMOMA board Charles Schwab said in 2000. “The art world moves … quickly … It reflects our changing society.” According to Benezra, the city has, outside of New York, “the greatest body of private collectors of contemporary art” in the US.
On SFMOMA’s board are real estate magnates, venture capitalists and the CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer. The museum’s trustees have dug deep into their pockets and it has benefactors that represent really big money – the families behind the Hyatt hotel empire, for instance, and Levi Strauss retail. And when the museum held a party to celebrate its 75th birthday, Mark Zuckerberg came along.
SFMOMA’s reopening: a ‘game-changer for San Francisco’ – and contemporary art (The Guardian)