Dark Money Funds Art in the Age of Political Influencers

When Funding Political Content Means Funding Art

The internet personality is a new form of art. This contention has been put forward by Katherine Dee who wrote that social media personalities are “continuous works of expression—not quite performance art, but something like it.” I’ve attempted to quibble with this idea but ultimately found reasons to agree. For the moment, let’s assume it’s true: When you watch an internet personality ply their trade on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc., you are witnessing art being made.

In principle this applies to all internet personalities, whether they make content about skateboarding, fashion, pizza—anything. This seems obvious until you consider the internet personality who makes political content. Suddenly the stakes get higher and it becomes challenging to tease out where the politics ends and the art begins.

Art and politics have always mixed a bit like oil and water. Art, at its best, is timeless and universal, where politics, inherently, is local and provisional. Where art is welcoming and curiosity-inducing, politics is judgmental and conflict-inducing. This has never stopped people from mixing the two, but it does lead to some strange marriages.

And so it is with the online-political-personality-as-artist. Particularly in this new age where podcasting rivals mainstream media, there are significant, real-world consequences to the content put out by political influencers. This being the case, big money has flooded into the space. If the political online personality is fundamentally doing an art project, then, unwittingly, big money donors have now become major patrons of the arts.

Consider the extreme example of dark money from Russia or other adversarial governments. In the Tenet Media scandal, Russia funneled $10 million into the American media company to pay right-wing political influencers including Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern. When the scandal broke, it enraged many, and it caused quite a lot of embarrassment for Pool and the rest (who disavowed knowing anything about the source of the money).

Clearly Russia’s actions were nefarious and those implicated should feel scandalized. But at the same time, from the alternate perspective where the influencers are artists, Russia’s actions were vaguely benevolent, as they were inadvertently funding the careers of American artists, prompting them to create more art.

When federal prosecutors shut down Tenet Media, left-leaning content creators poured over this story with unremitting glee, creating even more hours of art in the process.

Speaking of left-leaning content creators…

Recently, the internet became captivated by a Wired article claiming that a dark money group called Chorus has been funding left-leaning influencers. Taylor Lorenz, who wrote the piece, painted the situation as an egregious scandal. I don’t actually buy that there’s any scandal here and I think Brian Tyler Cohen (who founded Chorus) has a perfectly reasonable explanation for the objectives of Chorus. But in any case, Chorus is an excellent example of big-money donors funding the careers (creative endeavors) of online personalities (artists).

According to Cohen, the goal of Chorus is to enable young creators to focus more time and energy on creating content and growing their channels. In practice, this all begins with anonymous, wealthy donors giving multimillion-dollar gifts to a nonprofit called the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which in turn gives money to Chorus, which in turn gives money to young people making videos and writing articles online. It’s wealthy patrons funding artists.

Taylor Lorenz herself is something of an online performance artist who benefits from the patronage of wealthy donors. For years she worked for the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos. While the Post mostly employs traditional journalists (artists in their own right), Lorenz acted essentially as the paper’s in-house influencer. She was paid by Bezos to make creative content and grow her online persona.

Even with regard to the Chorus situation, Lorenz gets funded by the Omidyar Network, which has a shared public donor with the Sixteen Thirty Fund. Lorenz argues that her agreement with the Omidyar Network is entirely transparent, so it can’t be compared to the Chorus creators, where dark money is involved. Fair enough, I suppose. But to my point: this is yet another instance of multimillionaires funding the arts.

So to recap: On the right, Russia funded content creators to attack the left, while on the left, dark money donors funded content creators to attack the right. And this, in a nutshell, is American politics! Red Team Artists vs. Blue Team Artists, each funded by deep-pocket patrons.

When I interviewed Katherine Dee about the Tenet Media scandal, I asked if she had any idea how many influencers were taking money from big donors to “spew propaganda.” She answered:

All of them, quite frankly. I don’t think everyone knows that they are, but I’ve asked people who have sort of been caught red-handed. I asked them in a journalistic context, “What happened?” And they were like, “I was already saying X, Y, and Z, then such and such a person was like, ‘Turn the volume up to eleven.’ And then they gave me money, they gave me the illusion of influence. I just was flattered. And I did it.”

This isn’t the first time in history that the lines between political action and art funding have been blurred. In the 1950s, the CIA secretly funded abstract painters like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko in order to project cultural superiority over the Soviet Union during the Cold War. This mission was so effective that, arguably, the entire modern art movement was something of a CIA psy-op. This may seem insane, but it’s well verified.

European history is filled with instances of rulers funding artists, whether for implicit or explicit political ends. Lorenzo de’ Medici, the ruler of the Florentine Republic, was a major influence on the Renaissance through his sponsorship of artists such as Michelangelo and Botticelli. Possibly the most significant art patron in history was Louis XIV of France, who established the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Palace of Versailles.

In today’s online world, governments and dark money groups are the new kings. And the internet personalities we all know and love are their patrons. Tradition carries on.