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New Patrons of Chicago: Money, Taste and the Quiet Competition to Shape the City’s Cultural Legacy

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  Chicago’s great cultural institutions were never built by institutions alone. Behind the museums, orchestras, theaters, universities, architectural landmarks and collections were people with money, opinions and, frequently, a highly developed sense that the first might give permanence to the second. The city’s cultural history is therefore also a history of private ambition translated into public form. Industrialists who had made fortunes from railroads, meatpacking, machinery, retailing, real estate and commodities eventually confronted a problem peculiar to successful people: once you have acquired more than you can reasonably consume, what exactly is the money for? Chicago’s answer, more often than one might expect from a city historically associated with hogs and wheat futures, was culture. Families collected paintings, financed museums, supported orchestras, endowed universities and attached their names to buildings intended to survive them. They were generous, certainly, bu...
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Collecting Chicago: Why Sophisticated Buyers Should Look Beyond New York, London and Los Angeles

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 There is a particular kind of art collector who arrives in New York with a list. The list contains the correct galleries, the correct artists, the correct auction results and, perhaps most importantly, the correct people whose approval will confirm that the collector has purchased correctly. This is an efficient way to spend a considerable amount of money. It is not necessarily a good way to build a collection. The distinction matters because art collecting, at its most serious, has never been merely the acquisition of expensive objects. Anyone with sufficient capital can buy an expensive painting; auction houses have spent generations making the procedure nearly frictionless. Building an important collection requires something more difficult: judgment exercised consistently over time, relationships that produce access and knowledge, an understanding of provenance and art history, a willingness to buy before consensus becomes comfortable, and enough intellectual independence to oc...
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Can Art Turn Forgotten Real Estate Into Cultural Capital?

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   Real estate has a vocabulary for almost everything except imagination. A building is occupied or vacant, improved or distressed, stabilized or transitional, as though the fate of a place could be deduced from a spreadsheet and a sufficiently expensive aerial photograph. Culture is usually introduced later, once the architects have finished and someone notices that the lobby requires a mural. Theaster Gates has spent much of his career reversing that sequence. His work on Chicago’s South Side begins with the proposition that culture is not an amenity added to real estate after value has been created; culture can itself be one of the mechanisms by which value is created. Few projects make that argument more vividly than the Stony Island Arts Bank, the former Stony Island Trust & Savings Bank at 6760 South Stony Island Avenue, a once-vacant building that Gates acquired from the City of Chicago in 2013 and transformed into a hybrid cultural institution devoted to exhibition...
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Remarkable Cultural Economy Surrounding Ravinia and Chicago’s North Shore

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 There is a particular kind of summer evening on Chicago’s North Shore when culture ceases to be an event and becomes a form of choreography. Cars turn toward Highland Park. Restaurant tables fill earlier than usual. Wine is selected with considerably more forethought than most people devote to municipal elections. Friends negotiate who is bringing dinner, who has the tickets, who remembered the folding table and whether the person promising dessert can be trusted. Somewhere in Winnetka or Glencoe, a host is deciding whether dinner should precede the concert or simply be transported to it in enough containers to suggest a minor military exercise. By the time the music begins at Ravinia, the performance is only one element in an evening that may have started hours earlier and will continue afterward over drinks, introductions and plans for the next concert. This is why Ravinia is more interesting as an economic institution than merely as a music venue. The festival sits in Highland ...
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Strange Economics of High Culture in Chicago

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  There is something slightly misleading about the word nonprofit . It sounds austere, almost monastic, as though an organization has taken a solemn vow against money. Anyone who has attended a gala at one of Chicago’s major cultural institutions knows that the reality involves rather better tailoring. On any given performance night, an opera house, symphony hall, ballet company or major theater can resemble a luxury business with remarkable fidelity. There is the beautiful room, the expensive real estate, the scarcity of the product, the ritual of arrival, the hierarchy of seating, the well-dressed clientele, the cultivated air of exclusivity and, somewhere nearby, a glass of sparkling wine being sold at a price that suggests the grapes received graduate degrees.   A premium seat at a major Chicago performance can cost hundreds of dollars. Donors can contribute hundreds of thousands or millions. Galas are elaborate social occasions in which philanthropy, civic prestige and ta...
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