The business of philanthropy is turning money into power. Unfortunately, the kind of people who have a lot of money tend to be super into metrics. Money is super easy to measure. Power is super hard to measure—and the more measurable or even visible it is, the weaker it tends to be.
To really plant acorns, you have to get as far upstream of power as you can. While, as a donor, obviously your goal in funding the arts is world domination, there is no way at all to measure this impact. In art, the delay between action and impact can be decades.
And yet… the golden rule of fashion is that fashion flows downward. Do you want your ideas to be the ideas of a billion people, taught in a million schools? Then who are the first hundred people you want to infect?
Status is a pyramid. You want your ideas to start at the top and saturate every level of the pyramid before it moves down to the next. You want to traverse this pyramid in what computer scientists call a breadth-first search, not a depth-first search.
Every idea is a social network—the network of people it has infected—and the quality of a social network can only decline. People only want to join a network of people who are cooler than them. When we consider the capitalization of this network, the value of every eyeball is not equal. Celebrities are diamonds. Losers represent negative capital.