🌥 Hope floats, they hope

The art fair to end all art fairs, Art Basel, kicked off yesterday in — where else? — Basel, Switzerland.

Feel like Art Basel just happened? You’re not wrong — the organizers also host art mega-events in the fall (Paris), winter (Miami), and spring (Hong Kong).

That’s great, but why should nonbillionaires care?

Art Basel is known for top-dollar sales (see: aforementioned $40m spider) and it’s hard to get excited about shopping for a Rothko without the required millions in your wallet.

But the event is readying for an evolution. Per The New York Times, freshly installed chief exec Noah Horowitz envisions Art Basel’s future as more “experience” than art fair.

• Horowitz views Art Basel as a growing brand — one that could host, in essence, cultural world fairs that convene the art, fashion, film, music, and design communities.
• Lead investor James Murdoch (yes, of that Murdoch family) cited Formula 1, which takes over global cities for 23 races per year, as a model for Art Basel to follow.

Can they pull it off?

Art Basel has a strong head start — pre-pandemic, its flagship Basel event drew 93k attendees from 80+ countries — but its larger ambitions require more than branding; the global economy also must hold strong.

Inflation fears have already driven down art sale prices. In 2022, an Andy Warhol painting sold for $195m during New York’s auction week. In 2023, only one Warhol sold — for a measly $2m. Bummer.

The hottest trend in watching content is… reading it.

Between 2017 and 2022, the number of Netflix subscribers using subtitles more than doubled. In 2022, 58% of Roku customers used subtitles, including two-thirds of millennial users.

Something about words on the TV screen has struck a chord with consumers, and it’s paving the way for a Golden Age of video accessibility.

• For Roku’s customers, over one-third of subtitle users have diagnosed hearing impairments; another third uses subtitles situationally; and the rest… Well, they just do it.

Reading between the lines

In recent years, captioning and transcription software startups have seen tons of funding, like Verbit and Rev, which have raised $569m and $30.4m, respectively.

Another startup, Ava, which aims to help deaf and hard-of-hearing people live-transcribe anything from a Zoom call to, uh, “gossiping at lunch,” has raised $16.3m.

Hot air is attributed to many billionaires, but Google co-founder Sergey Brin is taking that to a new place.

Brin’s secretive side venture, LTA Research & Exploration, indulges his long-held flight of fancy: airships.

Yes, like the Hindenburg…

… but modernized, per Bloomberg Businessweek.

• LTA’s airships, built largely with carbon-fiber tubing, are lighter and more durable than dirigibles of old.
• Its first model, Pathfinder 1, is shaped like “a very tubby cigar” and powered by “helium cells,” diesel generators, and lithium-ion batteries.

OK, but why?

LTA imagines a few use cases:

• Eco-friendly hauling: Its airships can travel 2k+ nautical miles per trip and carry ~10x more cargo than a Boeing 737.
• Supply drops: Following disasters, ports, railways, runways, and roads can be inaccessible; airships can make vital deliveries without any of them.
• Exotic travel: If people want slow, scenic jaunts between destinations, LTA’s open to making it happen.

Your takeaway: Find someone who loves you like Brin loves airships; this is his second startup attempting to revive them. Brin — still an Alphabet board member who’s worth ~$105B — has funneled an estimated $250m+ into LTA so far.