Episode #578: Slow Art in a Scroll Economy: Gage on Rebuilding San Francisco’s Art Soul

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Gage to explore the intersection of classical art and San Francisco's tech scene. Gage, who describes his work as "neo-Renaissance" art—imagining what Michelangelo might create if he were from the nineties—discusses his mission to revive interdisciplinary arts in San Francisco through Mass Art and an incubation program aimed at putting the city back on the cultural map. The conversation ranges from the loss of craft training in modern art schools and the failure of traditional institutions to the challenges of creating meaningful work in an algorithm-driven culture that prioritizes immediate gratification over pieces that take years to complete. Gage shares his experiences running the Arts and Music Floor at Frontier Tower, organizing events like the Peptide Rave and UFB robot boxing, and his broader vision for breaking down the silos between San Francisco's tech community and its artists by creating immersive experiences that help each group understand and value what the other has to offer. Key Insights 1. San Francisco is experiencing a significant decline in arts institutions, with no long-running art schools remaining as of September, including the closure of CCA which will reopen with reduced capacity under Vanderbilt investment. This institutional failure represents a fundamental break from the Renaissance workshop model where artists learned under masters in multi-year apprenticeships, creating a situation where most talented painters today are entirely self-taught through lengthy trial and error rather than structured mentorship. 2. The Renaissance emerged from a rediscovery of Greek and Roman culture following the Dark Ages, when artists relearned three-point perspective and mathematical principles that had been completely lost. This pattern reveals that art quality directly correlates with cultural golden ages, and conversely, periods of cultural decline produce noticeably inferior artwork. The Renaissance succeeded because craftsman culture was rebuilt through workshops where young artists spent their entire lives developing skills, supported by substantial church funding and a society that valued beauty as essential to the good life. 3. Modern art education has shifted from craft to ideation, creating work that is primarily referential to previous art movements rather than emerging from personal creative exploration. Since modernism and Picasso's break with pre-modern art, each subsequent movement has largely been about reacting against the previous generation rather than developing unique perspectives. This results in art that lacks the depth that comes from spending years with a single piece, developing personal symbolic language, and filtering diverse influences through an individual creative lens that requires substantial time investment to develop. 4. The fundamental disconnect between San Francisco's tech community and arts community stems from tech workers' lack of exposure to humanities during their training, not from any inherent antagonism. When tech professionals are given simple art experiences like live painting with jazz bands and projection mapping, they respond with profound enthusiasm because they have never had context for understanding art's value. Breaking down this silo requires welcoming tech people into art spaces and providing experiential context that demonstrates art's meaning and impact. 5. Large-scale art events serve as highly effective and inexpensive vehicles for making technology meaningful to regular people, as demonstrated by events like the Peptide Rave and UFB robot boxing which achieved New York Times coverage with budgets under ten thousand dollars. These events function as trojan horses that allow tech companies to gain visibility where people actually engage with their work in meaningful ways. When artists lead experience design with