Tech Billionaire Patrick Collison and Economist Tyler Cowen Launch Grant Program for 21st Century Aesthetics

In late December, Stripe CEO and prominent tech billionaire Patrick Collison, alongside influential libertarian economist Tyler Cowen, unveiled a concise one-page website titled "A Call for New Aesthetics." This initiative formally announced an informal grant program designed to financially support artists, designers, and thinkers who aspire to define the aesthetic landscape of the 21st century. Collison, a co-founder of Stripe, a financial technology company valued at approximately $159 billion, possesses the considerable resources to invest in cultural and intellectual pursuits. The program's genesis stems from the observation that the 20th century's artistic and design paradigms were significantly shaped by the Bauhaus school, a German art, architecture, and design movement founded in 1919, which championed functionalism and modernist principles. Collison and Cowen posited that the current century warrants a departure from these established influences, suggesting a need for novel aesthetic expressions. They offered grants ranging from $5,000 to $250,000 to individuals with compelling visions for what a new aesthetic might encompass. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with hundreds of applications submitted within weeks, leading Collison to announce on the social media platform X that submissions had to be closed due to the sheer volume. By May, Collison and Cowen revealed that they had awarded 28 grants to a diverse cohort of recipients. The funded projects demonstrate a broad spectrum of creative and intellectual exploration. These include explorations into new architectural styles and linguistic frameworks, innovative approaches to bookmaking and publishing, and critical examinations of the interplay between design and software development, as well as the role of code in the creative process. The grant recipients also encompass traditional artistic disciplines such as sculpture and painting, alongside contemporary mediums like illustration and YouTube content creation, and extend to hardware design and general making. Illustrative examples of funded projects include an endeavor to "rethink what personal computing should be when the software inside it can think," a project focused on constructing a "silent, analog meditation timer," and another aiming to "depict the projected abstraction of life as perceived by life." This aesthetic grant program is not an isolated endeavor for Collison; it aligns with his broader interest in fostering cultural and intellectual progress. In 2019, he and Cowen co-authored an article in The Atlantic advocating for the development of "progress studies," a field dedicated to understanding the drivers of societal advancement. Further solidifying this commitment, Stripe later acquired "Works in Progress," an ideas journal that publishes essays and discussions on innovation and intellectual development. The "A Call for New Aesthetics" program represents a strategic investment in shaping future cultural narratives and artistic sensibilities, moving beyond the established canons of the previous century to cultivate a fresh and forward-looking aesthetic for the contemporary era.