A couple weeks ago I attended a talk at the American Bookbinders Museum in San Francisco, where Rob Reich and Alexander Berger spent a focused hour on the question of what to do about a forthcoming flood of philanthropic money. Asterisk Magazine hosted the event and framed it like this: hundreds of billions of dollars in AI wealth are about to go liquid, marking “(we hope) the beginning of the biggest wave of tech philanthropy yet.” It’ll be enough by their estimate to fund the equivalent of 5000 Institutes for Progress, and arriving faster than the field can absorb. Clara Collier, Asterisk’s Editor in Chief, moderated between two speakers who have known each other for years: Reich is a Stanford professor and political theorist who wrote Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy, and Berger runs Coefficient Giving. They didn’t agree about everything, and some of their disagreements have been running since 2016. The question I carried out of the room: is there an outcome that could benefit both our threatened democracy and the creative community of the Bay Area?
I’d been circling that question for a different reason. Last month I gathered some research on why authoritarian regimes move quickly and early to attack the arts when they come to power. The pattern is more than a hundred years old and holds almost everywhere you look. Stalin banned abstract art, the marker of expressive freedom in its time, outright in 1934 and made Socialist Realism the only legal form. By the Great Purge, artists who didn’t comply were sent to labor camps, and when a small group tried to show paintings in a Moscow park in 1974, more than a hundred police arrived with bulldozers and a water cannon to crush them. The Nazis confiscated more than 20,000 artworks as “degenerate” by 1937, and burned thousands of them in a Berlin courtyard in 1939. None of this is confined to 20th century history. Vietnam still requires every exhibition, concert, and film to clear a Ministry of Culture review before it can be shown. Director Trương Minh Quý's Viet and Nam, a tender portrait of two coal miners in love, was denied a distribution license in 2024 on the grounds that it portrayed "a gloomy, deadlocked, and negative view" of the country, and could only appear at Cannes after its Vietnamese co-producer was stripped from the credits. In Argentina, Javier Milei’s first decree on taking office in December 2023 dissolved the Ministry of Culture entirely, followed by the defunding of the Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts, the National Theater Institute, the National Institute of Music, and public media, with censorship of gender-based content spreading fear of reprisal among artists, critics, and curators. And the same logic is visible right now at home: in 2025 the Trump administration cut millions from national arts institutions and cancelled at least 29 already-funded programs. It pulled a $50,000 NEA grant from a MASS MoCA exhibition by the Indigenous artist Jeffrey Gibson on the stated grounds that it “no longer serves the interest of the United States.” The Trisha Brown Dance Company learned by email, the night before their premiere, that a 40k grant for a Rauschenberg centennial concert had been revoked. And it’s not over.
Why do governments seeking authoritarian control restrict culture in their first wave of changes? Because they understand what their opponents tend to forget: art and creativity are a credible threat to power. Reich’s book builds on a version of the same insight, argued from the opposite direction. His case for why a democracy should incentivize private giving turns on what he calls presentism, “democracy’s systematic and pervasive bias in favor of the present.” Elected officials answer to the next election, and anything too slow, untested, or politically inconvenient struggles for funding through ordinary government channels. There is a layer of government designed to persist across elections, but DOGE showed us how vulnerable that layer can be. A foundation with an endowment is insulated from the cycle. It can fund what government structurally can’t, and keep funding it while administrations change. Put my research and Reich’s argument together and they arrive at the same conclusion from different angles: government doesn’t just under-provide for culture because it’s biased toward the present, it makes whatever cultural support it does provide only as durable as the next election.
So here is the proposal. An independent, well-governed endowment of $500 million, funded by the new philanthropic wealth of the Bay Area’s own AI industry, and dedicated not to a single institution, a Harvard or a Yale, but to an entire region: the nine counties of the Bay Area. Nearly all of it would go directly to the working painters, sculptors, playwrights, musicians, writers, performers, poets, and filmmakers (I’ll use artists) of the region the AI industry calls home, structured so that no administration, board, or single funder can do to them what Washington did to MASS MoCA. You might call it a moonshot, in the sense that term is used by the industry: a proposal ambitious enough to match the scale of the wealth behind it. And there’s a subtext: the models generating all the wealth were trained on the collective creative output of this very generation of writers, makers, and artists. An endowment for working artists is one direct, even if symbolic, way to return a portion of that value to the kind of people who produced it, in the place where the industry lives, where it might directly benefit.
Reich and Berger opened by responding to an essay that raised these questions before mainstream media picked them up, Nan Ransohoff’s “The Third Wave of American Philanthropy“. Their main difference concerned how to anticipate the quantity, and where the money might be parked while donors figure out how to spend it. Against those quantities, $500 million is modest: less than a tenth of one percent of what Americans already give to charity in a single year, well under half a percent of the OpenAI Foundation’s stake in its own for-profit arm (a 26 percent share valued at $130 billion at the 2025 restructuring), and about 2 percent of one year of Ransohoff’s low-end estimate of $25–37 billion in new AI philanthropic capital. A fraction that small would counteract the recent setbacks of the Bay Area arts scene and sustain creative practice here for decades.
A timely comparison: Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the New York City Council recently approved $323.8 million for the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs in a single fiscal year, the agency’s highest appropriation ever and a nearly 7 percent jump over the year before. Part of that new money creates a Cultural Stability Fund, ten million dollars a year through 2029, built specifically to protect arts and culture from the kind of politically motivated cuts that affected Gibson and the Trisha Brown company. New York found more than half of what this proposal asks for in a single budget cycle, from a single city government, as annual spending rather than principal. The Bay Area is home to the wealthiest industry in history.
Before getting to structure, I want to place the fund on an axis running through a parallel conversation in the tech world. On February 14, 2026, Paul Graham posted a prediction: “In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make.” Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, echoed it within days, almost as a company line: “Taste is a new core skill.” Cloudflare’s CTO, Dane Knecht, had already declared taste the engineering differentiator of 2026. Journalist Amy Francombe put the underlying claim as sharply as anyone this spring: “Taste is not the ability to predict what will perform well; machines are increasingly capable of that... taste functions as a framework for decision-making... To choose one thing over another for reasons beyond money.” Reading across these references, this is a facet of the tech world recognizing that its own future depends on people who have spent most of their lives developing exactly that capacity. A city dense with artists working at a high level is a competitive advantage: for products, for quality of life, for the reasons people choose one city over another. If San Francisco wants to be a serious rival to other major cities on that terrain, this endowment (or something like it) is what it takes.
“To choose one thing over another for reasons beyond money,” is close to a description of what a grants jury does. What I’m proposing works differently: a research-driven award, checked by experts in each field. No applications, no panels to charm, no grant-writing as a second unpaid job. The fund tracks the documented activity of the region’s artists (exhibitions, performances, publications, awards, reviews, lectures, interviews) weighted for significance as well as quantity, and supports the highest-ranking artists in each category after a careful check for gaming and a close review by experts with contextual and historical knowledge of their field. The criteria are published, versioned, and open for argument, the way software is; call it an algorithm in its most expanded sense. An artist who believes the rankings undervalue her can point to why, and contest it. I know the objections this invites: metrics favor the already visible, and activity is not the same as quality. Yet both are useful, and both are why experts stay in the loop and why the criteria keep evolving in public. But consider what it replaces: opaque juries, unstated preferences, and decisions no one outside the room can examine. A transparent criteria artists can see and contest is better than a subjective and unspoken set of preferences they can’t. The groundwork already exists for the visual arts category in the form of a wiki I’ve started here, an evolving nexus of inquiry into the region’s artists.
$500 million, invested and drawn down at 5 percent a year, the federal minimum payout for private foundations, produces $25 million in annual grantmaking. That supports 750 artists a year across five categories, split evenly: Music, Time-Based and Performing Arts, Visual Arts, Creative Writing and Poetry, and Transdisciplinary, a structure close to Belgium’s Art Sector Work Allowance. Eligibility begins with an artist’s first documented exhibition rather than their age, a lesson from two art-world prizes that tried age ceilings, the Turner Prize at fifty and Canada’s Sobey Award at forty, and abandoned them by 2021 once it was clear an artist can emerge at any age. Twenty-one million of the twenty-five, 84 percent of the annual payout, goes straight to artists across two tiers.
Emerging covers the first ten to fifteen years of documented practice, and the annual figure comes from two countries already running versions of this program. Belgium has treated working artists as regular employees since 2002, on the understanding that between paid gigs an artist shouldn’t be sent to a general unemployment office and told to take any available job; support is built around the actual shape of an artist’s income, on the theory that finding the next exhibition, performance, or commission is itself the work. As of 2024 that system covered 8,560 people, paying an average of roughly €15,888, or about $18,140, to each artist per year. Ireland’s version is simpler: since 2022 it has paid a straight €325 a week, about $19,300 a year, to a cohort of about 2,000 working artists, with no criteria beyond an active professional practice and no restrictions on how the money is spent. It worked well enough that Ireland made it permanent in 2026. My proposed Emerging grant is $22,000 a year for a two-year term, splitting the difference between the two countries and partially adjusting for Bay Area cost of living. The category is reassessed every two years against the artist’s level of activity, their momentum. Emerging artists have the option to move to the Professional tier after ten years, and must after fifteen.
The Professional tier borrows from Finland, which reserves its state artist grant for artists the government has already recognized as professionals, a status that has to be earned. That grant currently pays €27,130 a year, about $31,000, tax-free, in terms as short as six months or as long as five years; I’ll average it to three. Partially adjusted for the Bay Area’s cost of living relative to Helsinki’s, the Professional grant here is $40,000 a year for a three-year term.
The Professional tier also carries an obligation, borrowed from the country that has been doing this longest. Japan has designated Living National Treasures, Ningen Kokuhō, since 1950: a capped roster of 116 people, formally recognized by the government as Preservers of Important Intangible Cultural Properties. The title carries weight, and a requirement. In exchange for the honor, each Living Treasure is expected to keep working, to perform or exhibit publicly, and above all to train the next generation, directly and formally, for as long as they hold the title. Three-quarters of a century of that requirement is a large part of why lacquerware and Noh theater remain living practices in Japan rather than museum pieces behind glass. What are the comparable traditions of the Bay Area? That’s an inquiry the fund will take up.
And the Bay Area can no longer assume its own cross-generational transmission will continue. SFAI closed in 2022 after 151 years. CCA, itself more than a century old, announced in January 2026 that it will close at the end of the 2026–27 academic year and sell its San Francisco campus to Vanderbilt University. At their peak the two schools sent more than 200 MFA graduates a year out into the city; what remains are art departments inside larger universities and state schools, with no independent art college left in the region. So the Professional tier asks a scaled-down version of what Japan requires of its masters: each Professional artist hosts at least one public workshop a year at a Bay Area nonprofit, open to the community. Two hundred fifty workshops a year won’t replace an art school (CCA employed more than 300 artists of all stripes, SFAI over 200), but it establishes a baseline, a guarantee that the region’s most accomplished makers keep sharing their experience, knowledge, and techniques even as the institutions that once made that automatic disappear. Will artists move to the Bay Area for access to funding and mentorship like this? I think so — it’s a reason to arrive beyond the good food and temperate climate. To that end, eligibility requires at least one year of residency in the Bay Area for Emerging, two for Professional, twice what the UC system once required to qualify as ‘in state’.
Of the 750 funded artists a year: 250 Professional and 500 Emerging, which works out to 50 and 100 per creative category respectively. It’s worth setting that against the four programs above. Belgium’s system, after two decades of expansion, covers 8,560 recipients in a country of nearly twelve million; Ireland’s newer, tightly capped program covers 2,000 artists nationwide; Finland has roughly 600 artists actively on a state grant at any given time once the longer terms are counted; and Japan caps its Living National Treasures at 116 in the entire country, a title so scarce that most working artists will never see one open up in their lifetime. Seven hundred fifty, for one region of 7.7 million people, lands in the middle of that range. The support isn’t indefinite, but recurring terms of two and three years are enough for an artist to build real momentum. And imagine being an artist in the moment when that opportunity lands.
The fund is a bet on creative talent, and rests on two structural claims: that a transparent criteria artists can see and contest beats an opaque one they can’t, and that a structure built to survive changes in political weather beats one that isn’t. Whether even half of that holds is part of the thirty-year experiment. I keep returning to my question from the Asterisk event, the one about democracy and culture. Authoritarians have historically burned or banned culture but that’s just the most vivid case… more often the losses come from benign neglect, a culture war, or cautiousness followed by an almost imperceptible decline. Mamdani’s bold move in New York argues that a city government can out-pace the fed’s suppression with a local increase. This essay and proposed fund suggests a region can do the same without waiting for a government to make the first move. To ask whether the Bay Area still has enough of an audience or an artist community to justify such the endowment is to get the order backwards. First, of course there are hundreds of artists here, as you can see on the wiki, and second the fund would expand that community: of artists, taste-makers, and aesthetically-minded talent who choose one thing over another for reasons beyond money.
Thanks for reading.
If you’d prefer to read some of my previously published art writing click over to First Blush, Last Laugh. Data visualization by Claude.