What Tech’s Unicorn Cult Can Learn from the Art World

In the thirty-one months since the investor Aileen Lee popularized the term “unicorn” as shorthand for a startup technology company worth a billion dollars or more, the concept has gone from novelty to gestalt to frenzy to trouble to embarrassment. Some unicorns have been sold for a fraction of their once-billion-dollar values. Others have had investors mark down the value of their stakes. A few, like the blood-testing company Theranos, have been accused of fraud, hinting at a rot beneath other startups. But one transformation wrought by the unicorn phenomenon endures: where company valuations used to be concerns that were tertiary to their identity, how much a company is worth now defines it. This change looks an awful lot like what has happened in the world of art. Later this week, for example, artists, curators, gallerists, and buyers will assemble at the blingiest of the art world’s annual big-money fairs, Art Basel, in Switzerland. The wealth on display, and the market’s influence on how the work is received, has become, over the decades, a permanent feature of the event.

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