cultural philanthropy

 

The Gray Market is a twice-weekly newsletter mapping the forces shaping the business of contemporary art, from inside and out. If you like this post, consider forwarding it to someone else who might too—or upgrade to a paid subscription for full access. The eroding island of cultural philanthropy Rich young people on the right and left are deserting arts nonprofits for opposite reasons Tim Schneider Feb 14   READ IN APP   Photo by Property #1, courtesy of Flickr (via Creative Commons license) It seems almost impossible that right now, while every other headline seems to focus on the latest wild thing Donald Trump did, pundits and professionals might actually be underestimating the role politics plays in some aspect of American life. And yet, I’ve started to wonder if this is true when it comes to the art trade’s understanding of philanthropy’s increasingly unsettled future. It’s true that a general consensus has emerged in this space: namely, that millennial and Gen Z donors think fundamentally differently about charitable giving than their Gen X and boomer predecessors, and that many nonprofits have been struggling to adapt to their new priorities. But the aggressive pivot to the political right by young voters, specifically young men, raises the possibility that the situation may be even worse than open-eyed experts already thought prior to Trump’s re-election. Why? Because there’s reason to believe the conclusions being drawn about next-gen donors overall actually only apply to next-gen liberal donors. Young conservative donors may barely be in the picture at all—and their attitude suggests not much can be done to change their minds. I started thinking about all this after reading Kate Lindsay’s Business Insider story about the Making Money Make Change conference in Nashville. Lindsay describes the event as one… “… designed to help wealthy young heirs and other high-net-worth people redistribute their money to causes like housing and climate justice. The host, Resource Generation, is at the forefront of an emerging cottage industry that’s helping a new generation of trust-fund babies get rid of their wealth, rather than accumulating more… The group now boasts 1,0000 members—more than 300 of whom joined after the 2016 election—seeking to divest themselves of $100m this year alone.” “This year alone” is an important qualifier. Attendees at the 2025 conference had a combined net worth of $246m, plus another $1.5bn or so incoming through their inheritances, according to the cumulative results of a survey completed by nearly every person at the event. (Seven attendees opted out of the questionnaire.) Their internal anguish is also a microcosm of what’s happening somewhere within the so-called Great Wealth Transfer, which will see tens of trillions of dollars bequeathed by dying boomers before 2050. Lindsay describes the conference-goers she met as experiencing “a mix of emotions” over their net worth, led by “confusion, guilt, shame, [and] resentment.” In the story’s most beyond-satire scene, Resource Generation staff tried to help attendees cope with these feelings by instructing them to embody their “wealth shadows,” striking poses that reflected each person’s sense of the burden of their inheritance. These included a duck-and-cover-style crouch, the fetal position, and an X-shaped forearm cross over the face; afterward, attendees were given sprigs of rosemary to sniff to help them “arrive back in [their] bodies.” The exercise and the negative emotions, Lindsay writes, stemmed from “the deeply held beliefs of many Gen Zers and millennials—a sense that great wealth should serve a greater good.” Upgrade to paid This credo is definitely real. It just also sounds more self-selective than it did a few years ago. Left to their own devices Lindsay’s findings from the conference gel with what many experts in the philanthropic space have been relaying since Covid. Next-gen donors have become largely uninterested in classical forms of charitable giving to arts and culture institutions, like sponsoring a museum expansion, funding a major acquisition, or anything else that looks more like a display of soft power than a desire to make the world better for the underserved. Instead, young philanthropists tend to want to give in ways that are more impact-driven, more clearly redistributive, and more socially conscious. This paradigm shift has been particularly unforgiving for larger, more staid arts and culture nonprofits. Leslie Ramos, an advisor on philanthropy and institutional development, put it this way in a talk I moderated at TEFAF New York last spring: “Even big institutions are struggling for funding. There is donor fatigue. It’s true that we’re experiencing levels of wealth that we haven’t seen before… but that is not necessarily translating into more donors, more supporters, and more visitors.” The challenge is even more acute among younger benefactors. As Scott Stover, the philanthropy advisor behind the podcast Giving Back Is Dead, said in a 2023 episode of the show, next-gen donors “do not want to be seen as supporting exclusive, exclusionary activities.” Youth isn’t the only factor that shapes donors’ approaches, though. On that same podcast episode, Anna Raginskaya, the Investing With Impact director at Morgan Stanley’s Blue Rider Group, drew a distinction between donors enriched by inherited wealth versus self-made wealth, with guilt once again being a main driver of the former’s philanthropic strategy. “There’s a real desire to demonstrate how you are more of an advocate for organizations—a connector, a producer—and less someone who writes a check and gets their name on a building for the personal satisfaction of having their name up on that building,” she said. So, age matters, and the method of wealth accumulation matters. Other elements undoubtedly do, too. Lindsay notes in her story on Making Money Make Change, for instance, that “most” of the attendees were “young, white, queer women.” Obviously, it would be dumb and offensive to say that gender and sexual identity determined their perspective on how and why to give away their wealth. But it would be just as weird to conclude that identity factors had absolutely no influence over their philanthropic mentality—which is, in a real sense, an expression of their politics. Of all the blind spots in the data on wealth and its transfer between generations, young heirs’ political affiliations strike me as one of the most important to the future of arts philanthropy. Then again, nonprofits may not want better visibility on this issue given the red wave washing over the demographics they need most. The right to wreck You don’t need me to tell you that Gen Z voters in the US broke hard for the Republican ticket in 2024. One study found that 58% of men between ages 18 and 27 voted for Trump this past November, the first time the majority of this group went red since George H.W. Bush’s presidential win in 1988. Crucially, the clock has turned back to the ‘80s in a more overarching sense, too. Sean Monahan, the trend forecaster who named the now-infamous “vibe shift” in 2021, recently taxonomized the emergence of what he calls the “boom boom aesthetic,” a shift in taste and lifestyle choices that complements the rightward tilt of next-gen politics. Think of it as a contemporary spin on the cocaine-fueled, status-obsessed Reagan era: conspicuous consumption, ultra-luxe wardrobes, sports cars, stimulants, and the quest to become Masters of the Universe. It’s tempting to wonder whether this cycle could actually benefit institutions that have struggled to adapt to the more progressive, socially conscious young philanthropists. After all, if people in their 20s and 30s once again want to flaunt their wealth like their excess-minded predecessors, why shouldn’t that include writing a check fat enough to get a building named after them? I don’t buy it, though. The reason is that one of the central ingredients in the boom-boom stew is anti-institutionalism. In the ‘80s, it was cool to elbow your way to the top of society, partly because getting there meant knocking the genteel older generation down a peg or two. Going back further, in the original Gilded Age, American industrialists spent like mad, including on art and arts philanthropy, partly to prove they were even wealthier and more sophisticated than the bluest-blooded families of old Europe. It’s the reason we have the Frick, the Morgan, the Huntington, the Carnegie Museums, and more. Upgrade to paid But in the 2020s, there’s no clearer indicator of your superiority than either tearing the whole structure down or abandoning it to collapse on its own, while trolling everyone inside as you do it. This is especially true for the next gen, as Brock Colyar of New York wrote about the “newer type of conservative” dominating the inauguration-night party circuit in DC (emphasis theirs): “They are not disenfranchised or working class or anti-elite or many of the other adjectives used to describe Trump supporters since 2016. Rather, they are young, imposingly well connected, urban, and very online. They are rebels once again storming Capitol Hill, though without the pathetic scariness of the January 6 rioters.” In other words, they have exactly the donor profile a future-conscious art nonprofit would want—except for their complete and utter mismatch on values. Colyar adds (this time, emphasis mine): “This set’s most visible political stance is a reaction to what it sees as the left’s puritanical obsessions with policing language and talking about identity. A joke about Puerto Ricans or eugenics or sleeping with Nick Fuentes could throw a pack of smokers outside [one party venue] into a gigglefest. Recounting her time at one of the balls, a woman tells me she jumped the velvet rope into a VIP section “like a little Mexican.” Then she lets out a cackle. This is the posture that has attracted newcomers to the cause.” I don’t want to act as if US art museums have been infallible paragons of progressive ideals since Covid emerged, but they’ve tacked a hell of a lot closer to that end of the continuum than what Colyar is describing here. Remember the controversy over the Philip Guston retrospective a few years ago? Can you imagine the response a museum’s development team would get if they tried approaching the young, metropolitan MAGA crew after doing anything even remotely like that? To be clear, I’m not proposing that art nonprofits should Trumpify themselves to attract young donors from the far right (though they’re already doing that to some extent by eliminating DEI language and programs). What I am proposing is that we should be careful about how far we draw out the parallels between the ‘80s and the mid-2020s. Back during the culture wars, Republican lawmakers were treating museums and art nonprofits as convenient targets by withdrawing public funding to advance a larger political agenda about “American values.” The difference, I think, is that most of them probably still believed the country should have public art museums. They could grandstand on allegedly offensive exhibitions because they agreed that the institutions hosting them mattered. That’s no longer the case, either on Capitol Hill or among rich next-gen conservatives. Elected (and unelected) officials are gleefully cutting off public funding as fast as they can, forcing art nonprofits to lean harder than ever on private donors to survive. Yet the centrist and left-leaning factions of the young philanthropic class probably don’t want to donate in simple ways anymore, and the right-leaning factions probably don’t want to donate at all. This leaves museums and other nonprofits stuck in a shrinking middle with an aging donor base whose wealth is likely to transfer toward one political pole or the other in the next couple decades. The gamble for these institutions is between reinventing themselves to the liking of the conscience-freighted young liberals—or trying to hold their ground long enough for the vibe to possibly, maybe, if they’re lucky, shift back to the center someday. Upgrade to paid You’re currently a free subscriber to The Gray Market. 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