On San Francisco: Fake Estates

Abstract A contribution to October's series Arts Communities at Risk, “Fake Estates” explores the systemic collapse of intersecting art worlds in the San Francisco Bay Area in the wake of the announced closure of California College of the Arts, its campus and facilities having been acquired by Nashville-based Vanderbilt University. The essay traces the demise of the 120-year-old art college to larger trends—the so-called “demographic cliff” augured by higher-education statisticians, a shrinking population of international students during the second Trump administration, and hapless gestures at incorporating artificial intelligence into an art school curriculum. It also narrates CCA's disastrous campus expansion project, which was funded by staggering debt, and a penchant among the school's trustees for blurring the lines between financial responsibility and private gain. It situates this travesty within a widening crisis in the region's art galleries and museums, many of which have announced diminished programs or hours, layoffs, and closures in recent years, and assesses recently announced alternative institutions—Art + Water, the Further Triennial, and the California Academy of Studio Arts—that hope to fill growing cracks in the city's arts ecosystem. In all these developments the author finds the pervasive distorting logic of financial speculation: the valuing of potential assets over existing cultures.