It's my great honor to introduce Patrick Collison. He's the co-founder and CEO of Stripe, the co-founder of the Arc Institute, and the founder of Stripe Press. I also learned backstage that he is not a fan of Virginia Woolf because her novels contain too much interiority, and writing novels with too much interiority is, as some of you know, my entire life's work. I still very much look forward to this conversation regardless. Patrick and Luke, let's give it up.
Luke, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. And I think it's apocryphal, but you know, there is the line about Freud having said that the Irish are the only people impervious to psychoanalysis.
Good. Freud is in Andre's camp with the interiority, it sounds like.
Yeah. The original Maxer.
The original Maxer. Yes. Well, thank you. So, you know, I want you to explain in your own words. You're here because, full disclosure, I'm the recipient of a New Aesthetics grant, and Patrick announced a new program with Tyler Cowen to give grants for sort of aesthetic experimentation late last year. And it doesn't seem like last year is the first time that you've ever thought about aesthetics. You know, Patrick is the founder of Stripe Press, very strange for a technology company to start a publishing company that makes, hands down, and I truly mean this, my publisher might not like this, but the most beautiful books as objects of any publisher in the world. So you've clearly been thinking about aesthetics for a very long time. So where did you personally get interested in this topic, and what is the origin story of the New Aesthetics grant process? Where did it come from?
Yeah. So, you know, context for all of this is, I guess as you mentioned, I started, so Tyler Cowen and I started this together. And Tyler and I disagree on most matters aesthetic. So the whole thing is a bit of an improbable collaboration, but I'll give my perspective at least, and you know, if Tyler was here virtually, he might dissent at some parts. So the first thing is, and I think Dana is here somewhere, but various people including Dana have commented on how so much of culture and how so much of aesthetics is stuck. It's not really changing very much. And so if you look at the Bauhaus Dessau building built in 1926, it's this sort of modernist glass steel office building or something that has the appearance of an office building. If you look at that photo and you didn't know it's from 1926, you might guess that it was built last year. And this phenomenon in architecture is also exhibited and recapitulated across many other visual domains. I mean, there's just some strange phenomenon where we appear to be stuck.
And the thing and I agree on is this question of, well, what could come next. From my standpoint, there's a second thing, which is, you know, what exactly modernism is is obviously not rigidly defined. But there was of course a movement in the early 20th century with the explicit conscious goal of repudiating beauty and prettiness and harmony and truth and virtue and dignity. And I think that program, I mean, you got to hand it to them, was extraordinarily successful. They really did revector art as a whole. And now so much of, and by the way, I don't offer these characterizations to impugn these people. Like, I think the best way to prove this case as to the motives of these people is simply to just go read them in their own words, read their manifestos. Like they weren't hiding it. If you read what the creators of De Stijl or any of these movements or Neue Sachlichkeit, they say themselves we want to tear down beauty, we disagree with harmony. So anyway, I think art has been, these people were extraordinarily successful and aesthetics has largely continued in that lineage for the past century.
And then the third thing with New Aesthetics is just this question of to what degree can you intervene at the last stage of the funnel, right? Because obviously aesthetics and art is a product of culture and of education and craft and technical skill and galleries and selection. You know, there's many steps involved. And we were sort of curious, well, by intervening at the last step with these grants, to what degree could you repoint things? And you know, I guess it's too soon to judge, but that's where it came from.
So you're using words like virtue and beauty. These are sort of very charged, almost religious sort of words. You know, this conference is about life. Is there then some connection between aesthetics and ethics, or aesthetics and the good life as Aristotle might put it? Do you believe that, or else why, or if not, why is aesthetics so important to you?
I think it's complicated. You know, obviously for most of Western history we've thought there's some connection there. And the Greeks thought so, and Plato thought so, and Horace thought so. And actually the best thing I've read this year, we were just talking about The Nature of Gothic by John Ruskin, and Ruskin sure thought so. But again, it's, you know, as someone pointed out last night, actually maybe 1930s Germany was one of the most aesthetically educated polities and cultures in history and it didn't rescue them. It didn't save them. So whatever relationship that's there is nuanced. For me, I don't know, it's hard to distill it all I guess, but I was very moved by Solzhenitsyn's line in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech where he talks about the ancient triad of beauty, goodness, and truth, and goodness and truth people can dissemble and they can obfuscate and misapprehensions can develop and so forth. And he argues that beauty is special because it bears within it its own verification. You can't really fake beauty, like the heart knows. And that seems like something very precious and special to me, and especially in a time where, again, at least in my subjective view, the world does not suffer from a surfeit of beauty. It seems worth trying to fan the bellows.
Would you go so far as to say there's an objective dimension of beauty that we can deliberate about?
I think it's intersubjective, as in, I think, well, in surveys, there seems to be broad, actually there's a great book on this, actually, the title Beauty by, gosh, I'm forgetting his name, hey, I'll, the name will come to me in a second, but he marshals a lot of evidence about, Stefan Sagmeister, he marshals a lot of evidence about, you know, the degree of general assent and agreement as to what constitutes beauty. And he finds that most people do in fact agree on that which is beautiful. And you kind of know this intuitively, as in people tend to go to the same sorts of places on vacation, right? Like lots of people go to Toledo in Spain and not that many people go to Toledo in Ohio. Sorry to anyone from Toledo, Ohio. Ireland is not very beautiful either. I've not, and yeah, maybe we should all be going to Toledo. Maybe it's just a branding thing. But yeah, people in general, there seems to be a lot of convergence and a lot of agreement. You see this in the literary canon to some extent.
Although he points out in this book that there is a wrinkle, which is experts tend to have somewhat divergent views. And so, you know, the masses like things that are harmonious and melodious and embody, I don't know, conventional conceptions of beauty. Whereas, if you're a real expert, especially today, you like disharmony and discordance and things that are more complicated and challenging. And I think part of what's happened in aesthetics over the last century is that this divergence has increased. There was more concordance between what cultural elites believed was beautiful and what the regular person did. And now I think we kind of have two camps. You bring a kid to the modern art museum and they're pretty confused. But I think you bring a kid to the Louvre, they have a better sense for what's going on.
Well, I can affirm. So a little known fact about Cluny is that every single team member that we have is either a writer, an artist, or a poet. Every single one of us, and we diverge dramatically on questions of aesthetics sometimes. So, sorry to put you on the spot, but speaking of the kind of question of beauty and things that we can all agree on, I want to show you something by some of my favorite artists, Elmgreen & Dragset. They're an artistic duo based in Berlin. And this is one of their art pieces. There's actually a street outside that is a silicone woman who appears to be asleep at her desk and we're going to do a caption contest.
Yeah, exactly. We should do that live. And she looks completely realistic and they provoke reactions from people passing by in the street. And another famous piece of their artwork is, this is in Marfa, Texas. They put a fake Prada shop in the middle of basically a deserted highway. And it's meant to provoke discourse. So, is there a, I guess, a place, I mean I don't think anybody would argue that the silicone exhausted worker asleep at her desk is a beautiful piece of art, aesthetically beautiful, but is there a place I guess for art that provokes or probes and gets people asking fundamental questions? It's a very modernist kind of thing to sort of probe and to sometimes sacrifice beauty. Is there any place for that?
I used to argue a lot with the EAs about effective altruism and I think one of the best arguments for EA is to simply ask the question, you know, what fraction of all philanthropic dollars in the world today are given in accordance with EA principles. I mean, who knows exactly what that number is? Maybe it's higher now than it was 10 years ago, but let's just say arbitrarily it's 1%. Right? And so the claim does not have to be that all efforts or all resources or the totality of society's altruistic endeavors ought to be pursued in accordance with the EA principles. Maybe you can be an effective altruist in the sense you think it's 1% and perhaps it should be 5%. And I sort of feel that way about provocative art. I mean, clearly there are many instances through artistic history where things that we now view as cherished and wonderful and straightforwardly beautiful were seen as outrageous and provocative at the time. You know, Dylan going electric at the Albert Hall. And now it's nostalgic to listen to that, and many examples before that. But I feel like provocation occupies way too central a position from my standpoint in contemporary aesthetics. And, you know, I don't know what fraction of contemporary work aims to be provocative. It's impossible to objectively define of course, but whatever the fraction is, I think perhaps it should be, you know, a fifth of that.
So, since you mentioned EA, I want to ask you a question about sort of the patronage and funding and the allocation of capital to the arts. So, the New Aesthetics grants, correct me if I'm wrong, range from $10,000 to $250,000. And $250,000 is a lot of money to a lot of people, especially artists. However, it's not enough to build a new building or something like that, right? So, and you admitted you're sort of coming into the last stage here, right? So what are you thinking you can change at that stage with that amount of money? And also, you know, is there some kind of corollary to EA that could be applied to the domain of aesthetics? Should more money be allocated towards beautiful things? And how would that even, what would that even look like? It's very difficult from an EA perspective to evaluate that question.
Yeah. Well, first off, a disclaimer I meant to give up front is, you know, I am a tech bro sort of masquerading as somebody who knows a tiny fragment about aesthetics, but under actually under no delusions or illusions as to the extent of my knowledge here. And so maybe rather than anything I say being of meritorious substance, just maybe I'm just a metonym of the broader phenomenon of Silicon Valley starting to become somewhat more interested in aesthetics, and so perhaps to these patronage questions that's somewhat hopeful.
I wonder a lot about this though, to your question. I was recently in Detroit. Has anyone been to the Detroit Institute of Arts? Yeah. Amazing museum, right? Detroit was only rich for a few decades. Like, again, it's hard to define, to demarcate definitively, but let's say Detroit was rich because the depression happened. And so you have from like the invention of the automobile to the depression, like not very long. And so Detroit was rich for much less time than Silicon Valley has been. And yet you have Detroit and by the way, not only the museums, but the architecture as well, right? And we could do the Silicon Valley art tour in a coffee break. So there is something strange going on with the patronage.
But then when I think about that, I mean there's Burning Man, right? And it's not fine art but clearly there's some latent demand to produce things of aesthetic wonder. And I mean, it maybe seems uncharitable and presumptuous and inappropriate for the demand side, for the patrons or the would-be funders or whatever to kind of complain about the supply. But I do think there has to be something where, whether or not you view it as desirable, I think the production apparatus of art has descriptively changed enormously over the last 60, 70 years. We used to train people at much earlier ages. We used to train them much more in classical techniques. There was much more of a sense of continuity with the past where you're sustaining a tradition rather than sort of iconoclastically trying to define your own little patch. I mean, something I think a lot about is kind of the idea of groups, right? And that we speak about art in terms of all these movements, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Viennese Secession, whatever, Futurism, and these people intentionally, consciously, willfully affiliated in these groups. Like they published manifestos together in the newspaper. And now to be associated with a group is kind of pejorative. Every artist is idiosyncratically doing their own thing with complete independence, but they'd become offended if you told them that they're part of some larger group or movement. And so anyway, my point is just I think the supply dynamics have really changed a lot. And yeah, for whatever reason, I mean, I think on the East Coast people are still really into that, but for whatever reason, either because we here are all Philistines or because, well, something else. People seem to prefer the Burning Man stuff.
I don't know if you know that I'm from Michigan and we've got some Michiganders in the house here and we love Detroit. Detroit Lions. I was there for the first time recently. I thought it was amazing.
It is. It's a great city.
But have you been to West Michigan?
I went to North Michigan.
North Michigan. Okay. Well, you got to come to West Michigan, Southwest Michigan. I will be your hosting guide. But is there a question of, so Y Combinator for instance, which you have been involved in, I know you're very familiar with, there seems to be a nice mix of identification with the group in a positive way, combined with it's my company with a healthy sense of individuality. So it seems like there you have a both end. Is there, do we need a Y Combinator or something for art and aesthetics? Is there a place, is there a market for that? Would that help?
Well, I don't know this for a fact, but I've always assumed that YC was based on art ateliers and studios, right? Where I mean, so Paul Graham, the YC founder, he studied painting in Florence, right? And so you know, Rodin's studio and the idea of this kind of intensified hot house sort of environment where you're both trying to pass on a doctrine and set of practices and knowledge and so forth but also foster the emergence of the individual's creativity and originality. I mean, again Paul never told me this, but I've always assumed that he was in fact influenced by the art world. It seems that the atelier, the studio, the sort of master artists, that has receded somewhat as a phenomenon in the art world. I think it goes back to this broader point about just changes in training and the supply and the production apparatus more widely. So I guess my view is it would seem exciting to me to return to that, to see what new forms could be. It probably requires new patronage networks.
And by the way, you mentioned effective altruism here as an example and I think it's an interesting one to think about in the sense that EA had from an early stage, still has, a whole ecosystem, right? It has websites, it has communities, it has events, it has funders, it has companies, it has projects. Like it truly is a tapestry. And my takeaway from New Aesthetics, again it is just a small one-time one-off grants program, is that to actually catalyze the emergence of things that are truly new, we probably need a more complete ecosystem approach.
You know, I think what Nicholas Boys Smith, does anyone know Nicholas Boys Smith or Create Streets in the UK? No. Okay. Sorry. Okay, one person does. All right. So he was a former consultant. I think he worked at McKinsey. And like many people, he became puzzled as to why all the buildings are getting so ugly. Like he's walking to work. And in London, and this fact literally towers over you. And it's sort of hard to ignore. And so he has, over the last decade or so, he's written extensively about this. He has led to the creation of artistic prizes. He's got involved in certain projects. He's brought certain funders into the ecosystem. He's now thinking about training and the next generation of architects and so forth. But he's really taking a holistic view of the whole thing. There's now a Nicholas Boys Smith cluster in London and I suspect true progress here is probably going to have to have that shape.
As you were describing the network, are you familiar, you know, our friend Nadia, a friend of Cluny, Idea Machines?
Yeah. So that was very much part of the inspiration of what we're trying to build here.
And it seems like Idea Machines, I think maybe that essay needs a better title because I think it applies to more than just ideas, but the way that ideas are incarnated, and I think it probably applies to art as well, but I think that was the first thing that I thought of as you were describing that.
Yeah, I think she really gets how these communities work, whether it's in open source or other domains. And yeah, so I've been fascinated by a book by Lewis Mumford called The Brown Decades about the time between 1860 and 1890. And he called them the brown decades because brown was the color that was most associated with them. The world sort of looked brown. It's after the Civil War. And he said this is like a drab period. It seemed like a low point in aesthetics in the United States, but he's just an excellent writer. It's a really good book. But he said there was a quiet renewal happening even in the brown decades. The Brooklyn Bridge was constructed and conceived, Central Park. He talks about you sort of parks as changing the context of an entire city. So the whole point of the Brown Decades was that there was a quiet renewal going on.
So my question would be, I don't know, does our time have a color I guess, and then but the deeper question, the real question is where do you think the quiet renewal may be happening right now, the sort of invisibly, the things that we don't see on Twitter/X?
I've always been puzzled about Mumford being so bleak about the reconstruction period because I think, and look maybe it's always hard to appreciate one's country having as much as somebody who arrives at it starry-eyed. But I think American architecture between 1870 and 1920 is basically unquestionably the best in the world. Other places built amazing things at other times, and I mean there was other good stuff happening even in those years elsewhere, but if you go to any American town most of whose stock was built in that period you're basically guaranteed to find it to be beautiful. So yeah, I think his pessimism is a bit overstated.
In terms of renewal, I mean, I think social media has not been great for everything. It's hardly an unadorned good for society, but I think it's actually back to the Solzhenitsynian point. I think it's been very good for aesthetics. Because beauty bears within it its own verification. And there are so many diptychs and side-by-sides floating around the ecosystem where you do have to wonder what's going on. And I think you're starting to see hopeful grassroots, in particular in architecture. There's the, I mean we mentioned Boys Smith in London, but there's a similar movement in Scandinavia, the Scandi revival movement where they've, some architects have decided to kind of put their foot down. I mean, has anyone looked at recent work with Iranian brick architecture? Yeah, there's amazing. I would actually love somebody to write this article, you know, explaining how this emerged and why, but there's some really cool stuff being built there. So I think social media has been good for architecture and I think there's some signs of hope.
And then this is just maybe my parochialism speaking, but there's definitely, to me there's a palpable interest in Silicon Valley that wasn't there 10 years ago. I mean, Silicon Valley was always into design, but I don't feel like it was into the larger cultural project of aesthetics and how that is codependent upon the culture at large. Whereas, I mean maybe it's just the Stewart Brand thing, you know, we are as gods, we might as well get good at it. I think that as tech becomes more powerful and influential in the world, I think at least some people are starting to feel the sense that, well, we have to figure out our larger place in the cultural universe.
And by the way, I noticed somebody carrying on the Hamilton Society protocols by pounding the table when they heard something that they like. So, you can feel free to do that. You can hiss if I say something that you don't like, not something that Patrick says. So, feel free to keep the spirit moving here as we continue. Okay. And I saw the drinks outside, which I assumed serving alcoholic beverages was in honor of the Irishman speaking, but I understand it was actually for the debate.
It was a request for the debate itself.
We should still have it in here. I don't know. Feel free to keep drinking. I want to move now into sort of aesthetics and the sacred. And the question is basically what is the single highest leverage point for aesthetic renewal today? And I think it used to be churches, you know, it used to be if you were a patron or an artist and you wanted to do something that would really move the needle, you would get a commission to, you know, paint the ceiling of a chapel or a church or something like that. So that in my view was the single highest leverage point. It does not seem to be anymore. If somebody painted the walls of my parish in Washington DC, I don't think that's the highest leverage thing that that artist could do to get recognized. They might, I hate to say it, they might be better off making art that they post on X or something like that. That sort of pains me a little bit, but maybe it's not a bad thing. So what is it? And the sacred does seem to be important to aesthetics and to beauty. Has the sacred migrated somehow? Has it migrated to Silicon Valley or what is the single high leverage point? Because the New Aesthetics grants were kind of agnostic on the question of where and how and I know you got a wide variety of ideas.
Well, two thoughts. So, first I think the sacred is an endangered species right now. It's not had a good century. So, you know, I rather than the, the owl of the sacred, I'm not sure what animal species the sacred is, but, whatever.
No. Whatever it is. I'm not sure like, I don't know that the right model is that it migrates. I think it can just be, it can just be under threat. And you know there's this question of to what degree or how does, I mean, life can shape and influence aesthetics in various ways and you know has. And you know Neoclassicism reemerged in part, or rather Neoclassicism emerged in part because of the excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii and we were reminded of the wonders of the ancient world. So, I mean, it's kind of obvious life influences aesthetics. There's obviously the question of, you know, how does aesthetics influence life? Does it influence life?
And you know, you never know definitively, but something that Ruxandra who's here and I have been talking a lot about and thinking about for the last couple of months is, you know, there's of course the question that probably a lot of people here are preoccupied with about, you know, WTF happened in 1971. And why is everything so sclerotic? Why is everything so slow? Why are undertakings in the physical world now so challenging? Peter Thiel who I guess spoke at this event two years ago is one of the people who really directed attention at this question but now it's caught on more widely and you know Ezra Klein of course wrote the book. And the usual explanation is something like, well we were just doing so much stuff in the post-war period that eventually people got a kind of future shock and you know pulled the handbrake but we were building roads and bridges and skyscrapers and the interstate highway system and the whole thing. And this is basically the explanations you get in Ezra's book and in most other accounts.
I don't think it actually works as an explanation. I don't think it matches the evidence. Because if you just look objectively at periods in history where in a material sense society changed the most, the post-war period while a lot happened was not actually an outlier. The US changed way more in the 19th century and you know specific year in the reconstruction period as we were just discussing. You can look cross-sectionally across different countries and there does not appear to be any obvious correlation between the magnitude of the post-war change and the aggressiveness of the regulatory or the procedural response to everything that was happening. So it's really not clear that that explanation is satisfactory.
I think there's another explanation, another possible explanation that hinges much more on the sacred. And that is that until, you know, you can't pinpoint these things exactly, but until the early 20th century people and elites, people in positions of decision-making power were broadly motivated by, you know, very imperfectly and so forth, were broadly motivated by a set of ideals and beliefs about what should exist and how things should be done that accorded with that of the populace at large. There was a kind of legitimacy to their work. And when the medieval housing stock of London was torn down and replaced with Victorian buildings or Georgian buildings, people thought that that was at least not a grievous downgrade, right? And when ideology changed, because aesthetics is never just aesthetics, it's a broader worldview. I think that changed elite outlooks.
And when you look at the specific objections to what was happening in the 50s and the 60s that led to the backlash, they are very commonly expressed in explicitly aesthetically oriented terms. And so I think there may be a way in which the loss of the sacred is why we can't have nice things anymore. And in particular why progress in the world of atoms has slowed so much.
So as to how we revive the sacred, I mean, that's a hard question. I mean, the only solace I take is, you know, there are instances from the past, it has happened. Like Petrarch in the 14th century was feeling pretty grim about Europe and the dark ages and the internecine conflicts and all the rest. And you know, called for a revival in the culture and he kind of got it. I mean again we don't know the causality but the Renaissance at least chronologically followed. So I think one of the questions of our era is what exactly leads to that return of the sacred.
