Among founders, collectors and investors who have already achieved significant professional success, a question is emerging: What comes after achievement? For most, work remains uncertain and leisure a luxury. However, among a small, affluent group, a subtle yet powerful shift is underway with potential to reach far beyond the upper economic strata.
For more than 50 years, the prevailing formula for professional success has been relatively linear: education leads to a career, a career enables accumulation and accumulation brings validation. Globalization and mass production created an explosion of consumer goods and experiences, while status increasingly came to be expressed through visible consumption. Now, as A.I. tools accelerate our professional output and compress tasks that once took months into hours, the relationship between productivity and fulfillment is beginning to change. For those with the resources to benefit from these gains, success is taking on a different meaning once conventional measures of achievement have been met.
The question is no longer simply how people spend their time, but what gives that time meaning. Luxury has already begun shifting from ownership toward experiences, travel, hospitality and access. A week at Hotel Cap-Eden-Roc, a membership at Annabel’s or an African safari booked by Black Tomato has become the calling card of a particular kind of modern success. These experiences can be beautiful and restorative, but they are also fleeting. Even the most extraordinary trip eventually becomes a photograph stored on a phone. In an age of constant novelty, its ability to satisfy diminishes. After enough remarkable experiences, people begin searching for something that endures, which is where culture enters the conversation.
I’m witnessing this phenomenon through my work as director of the John Chamberlain Estate, where the artist’s former studio on Shelter Island is maintained as a place to encounter the sculptures and multimedia works he created during the later years of his decades-long career. The space is not open to the public, yet requests to visit arrive from around the world. The estate has hosted a range of figures operating at the highest levels of success in their chosen fields, from Solange Knowles to Daniel Arsham, Francisco Costa, Matthew Williams and more.
Luxury has shifted from ownership to experience, but even the most extraordinary experiences are fleeting. Sustained engagement with art and culture may represent the next evolution of leisure. Jason Schmidt
These visitors are experienced travelers and cultural arbiters who are accustomed to the most luxurious destinations and exclusive experiences, but what they seem to be seeking at the studio is something quieter. Visitors slow down almost immediately; conversations shift and their pace changes upon arrival. One collector recently stood silently in front of a single sculpture for nearly half an hour, studying its crushed steel surfaces before finally turning and saying, almost to himself, “You can feel the force that made this.”
When Knowles visited the studio, she spoke about growing up in Texas and being deeply influenced by museums founded by visionary women patrons there. Those institutions shaped her imagination as a young artist, long after their founders were gone. Cultural investment often works this way, eventually enriching countless lives from the seed of personal fascination. These moments happen often. Chamberlain’s studio and our private museum have become more than art and exhibition spaces—they’re meditative. Guests have frequently remarked that spending an afternoon with the work felt unexpectedly meaningful and, occasionally, among the most memorable cultural experiences of their lives. What they are responding to is not spectacle, but rather participation.
Living with art means encountering the same object repeatedly over years, discovering new relationships and meanings as time passes. It rewards patience rather than novelty. Collecting art is often understood primarily as acquisition, but at its most meaningful, it is also profoundly social and intellectual. Collections can emerge as sites of conversations with artists, curators, and other collectors, creating relationships across disciplines that might otherwise never intersect.
While working on Living with Chamberlain, the Assouline book devoted to the artist’s work, I spent time with collectors around the world, from Yvonne Force and Leo Villareal to the late Robert Mnuchin. What struck me was how rarely they spoke about investment or status, but rather about ideas, friendships and the strange feeling of belonging to a cultural lineage larger than themselves. The Villareals, for example, have owned a Chamberlain foam couch for several decades. Its meaning has changed alongside their lives. It was where they first met and fell in love. They started a family, and the couch evolved with them, eventually becoming a place of joy and respite from the challenges of everyday life. This is one reason culture can offer something consumption cannot. A luxury experience is often designed to be memorable; a cultural object can become part of a memory itself.
Collectors often describe artworks as companions to thought, but over time they can also become markers of memory and personal evolution. And the most interesting aspect of this shift is that it is rarely entirely private. Historically, when individuals become deeply engaged with culture, the results expand outward, with private collections evolving into museums and studios becoming foundations.
What comes after achievement? As technology changes the value of time, many are turning toward the slower, deeper rewards of culture. Jason Schmidt
History suggests this progression from cultural curiosity to public stewardship is not entirely new. Periods of extraordinary economic success have often been followed by periods of cultural patronage. During the Renaissance, the Medici family helped transform Florence by supporting artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Centuries later, the industrial fortunes of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick produced institutions that continue to shape cultural life. Carnegie funded thousands of public libraries across the United States, while Frick’s collection became one of New York’s most beloved museums. Isabella Stewart Gardner created a museum in Boston that still inspires artists and visitors more than a century later.
If we are entering what might be called a “leisure expansion era,” a period in which technological change and prosperity create more discretionary attention for some of the world’s most capable individuals, the implications may extend far beyond private collections and elite consumption. The question is what people do with that additional attention. Technology can create more time, but it cannot determine what that time is worth. Culture offers a possible answer: sustained engagement with ideas, objects, places and communities that become more meaningful through repeated attention rather than constant novelty.
The history of patronage shows that when private curiosity turns toward sustained cultural engagement, the effects can become public. Institutions, communities and ideas that endure have a way of shaping society for generations. Success, in that sense, may be less a destination than a condition that allows for deeper forms of contribution, gratification and meaning to begin.