The rise of the billionaire class has led to increased attention on the role of contemporary magnates in the art space. Some billionaires found art through their foundations, whose actions are transparent through their tax filings, and captured by the $Flow and the Philanthropies works. However, when individuals directly found art projects, their actions are largely invisible to the public. The BarabasiLab have started a project to unveil this cloak of invisibility, unveiling the role of billionaires in the art spate. In the business world it is very common for individuals to sit on multiple boards. As the Art Board work revealed, in the art space it is rare to have individuals sitting on the board of multiple museums or organizations involved in visual arts. Indeed, art institutions demand commitment from their board members, which means an expectation to use their resources and collections to benefit the institutions on whose boards they sit on. The Billionaires investigation extends on the Art Board project, by focusing not only on billionaires, but also their family members, and their giving and board membership.

The Billionaires Map relies on crowdsourced knowledge on 205,548 individuals with exceptional wealth or influence, data collected by the LittleSis project, a Public Accountability Initiative. The BarabasiLab identified 76 billionaires and 29 of their family members that had relationships to 39 artistic or cultural institutions. The resulting network reveals not only the central role billionaires have in art, but also how through their family members they extend their influence.

The investigation has unveiled six billionaire families that extend their influence by having family members sit on the board of different institutions, avoiding the appearance that the same person controls multiple art institutions.
A good example is Leon Black, who sat on the board of MOMA, while his wife, Deboard Black sat on the board of the MET, with the tacit agreement of these prominent institutions. Each of the six paintings put the spotlight on one such family, who have bypassed conflict issues and thus, together, as a family, have enormous influence on multiple art institutions. Their playful character points to the fact that for these families involvement in art is more like a game, or a toy, far from being a financial burden.

Credit: Billionaires, A.-L. Barabási, L.Shekhtman, Y.Liu, S.Dikshit