Art world's new challenge: connecting with tech titans

Featured on sfgate.com

Everyone who's anyone in tech was invited to the Silicon Valley Contemporary Fair in April. The San Jose Convention Center was abuzz with tech folks' enthusiasm about the new art on display.

When the night was done, the fair's visitors hopped in their hybrids, C++ on their minds and a song in their hearts, then moseyed on home - without buying a thing.

These days, the nation's most illustrious auction houses and galleries face a code that's hard to break: how to get tech types to collect art.

"It's the question everyone is asking," says Anna Hygelund, the fine arts specialist at Harvey Clars Auction Gallery in Oakland. "We are currently facing a similar climate to the turn-of-the-century America, where we have people like Frick, Carnegie and Morgan accumulating massive wealth in New York, and nobody really buying art at the time.

"Joseph Duveen (one of America's most famous art dealers) was able to get these people to start collecting. He made them aware of the importance and responsibility of paying into culture."

This has the auction world's big players focusing their efforts on the Bay Area - the center of tech culture and tech money - but it promises to be an uphill battle.

"San Francisco has always been the type of place where you don't need a dinner jacket to enter most restaurants," Hygelund says. "These people are wealthy, but they don't act wealthy.

"It's not just antiques or furniture, but their money is not being spent at the opera, the ballet or the symphony, and it really is a little alarming to see people amass these fortunes and not really want to invest them in cultural avenues."

Click here to read the full article.