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Dear all,

Dave Taylor recently sent me the following article about Clear Channel,
which I think others in the ISE field would find of interest.

Dennis

Dennis Schatz
Vice President, Education and Exhibits
Pacific Science Center
200 Second Ave. No.
Seattle, WA 98109
phone - 206-443-2867
fax - 206-443-3631

Media firm's museum shows concern some art curators 

By Mike Boehm 
Los Angeles Times 

Starting next year, Clear Channel Communications plans to send a large
wooden version of the Trojan horse on a tour of U.S. museums as a
frontispiece to an exhibition on ancient Greece and Troy.

The show will be the third inroad that the huge, diversified and highly
controversial media and entertainment corporation has made into the art
world since late 2001.

Clear Channel's empire-building in the arts extends further ó to touring
Broadway musicals, where its omnipresence as a producer and presenter can
mean trouble for competitors and cause wariness even among its partners.

Cultural gatekeepers, including art critics and museum directors, have begun
sounding a warning: Beware of a conglomerate bearing art. Indeed, detractors
may find it tartly amusing that Clear Channel wants to deliver a Trojan
horse to museums' doorsteps. To them, the corporate equivalent of pillage
and burn has been the company's battle plan since 1996, when the then-modest
outfit from San Antonio began a buying spree.

Clear Channel, which last year reaped $8.9 billion in sales and $1.1 billion
in profit, owns nearly 1,200 radio stations in the United States and almost
800,000 outdoor advertising signs worldwide. It controls about 100 U.S.
venues for pop concerts and other entertainment.

The result, critics complain, has been uniformity on the airwaves and
bullying in the music business. Some musicians, among them Don Henley, and
members of Congress, contend that Clear Channel has pressured pop acts to
play its venues or risk forfeiting exposure on its radio stations. Similar
allegations ó always denied by the corporation ó were to be tried last month
in a Denver federal courtroom, but Clear Channel avoided an airing by
settling with the rival concert promoter that had sued for damages.

Clear Channel's first blockbuster art exhibition, "Saint Peter and the
Vatican: The Legacy of the Popes," is at the San Diego Museum of Art through
tomorrow, the last stop on a four-city, 18-month tour. "Troy," featuring
relics from ancient Greece and Turkey in a show that aims to sift Homeric
legend from archeological fact, is next, although its expected four-year
itinerary has yet to be announced.

Also on the road is the pairing of "Chicano Visions" and "Chicano Now," more
modestly scaled exhibitions on contemporary Mexican American painting and
culture. Spearheaded by Cheech Marin, the comic actor from whose collection
most of the paintings were culled, they're at the Museum of Contemporary
Art, San Diego, until Sept. 12 ó one stop on a five-year, 15-city tour.
Marin says there's no way the show, which he hopes will bring Chicano
painters into the art world's mainstream, could have happened if Clear
Channel's exhibition division hadn't produced it.

Now, agenda-setters in the art world are awakening to Clear Channel's
arrival, and anxiety is growing. For some, the first alerts were harsh
reviews of the Vatican show in San Diego. The Los Angeles Times' Christopher
Knight found it "almost entirely devoid of significant art but awash in
decorative paraphernalia ... souvenirs, models ... reproductions and
reconstructions."

Actually, curators, consultants and museum directors tend to express
bewilderment that a corporation craving large profits thinks there's money
to be made from touring art shows. Museums have been organizing such shows
for decades and have usually had to fall back on private philanthropy and
government grants to fill the gap between costs and earnings. To make money,
some worry, Clear Channel inevitably must stint on the main ingredients of
excellence: scholarship that infuses a display with ideas and a painstaking,
often years-long quest to find and borrow just the right pieces to make
those ideas come alive.

Elizabeth Casale of New York-based AEA Consulting, which advises museums and
performing arts presenters about management and programming strategies, says
she lost sleep after reading about the Vatican show. One of her curator
friends in New York, she recalls, commented wryly that "the barbarians are
at the gate." She has not seen any of Clear Channel's exhibitions, but for
her, the corporation's reputation for voraciousness and standardization in
the broadcasting and concert industries casts a huge shadow on its arrival
in the arts. "I do think the museum world has a right to be scared," she
says.

Independent of Clear Channel's arrival on the scene, museum leaders already
had begun debating the influence of corporate money and how far they should
indulge showmanship at the expense of seriousness. Whether it's the
Guggenheim Museum's 1998 "Art of the Motorcycle" exhibition or the Boston
Museum of Fine Arts' rental of most of its collection of Monet canvases to a
for-profit gallery at the Bellagio hotel-casino in Las Vegas, recent museum
history provides ready examples of leading nonprofits straddling lines of
purity in search of bigger crowds and more ample revenues.

From their spot behind the art establishment's eight ball, leaders of Clear
Channel's exhibitions division try to counter what they see as
misconceptions about the Vatican show and their overall operating approach.
The division began as BBH Exhibits, a small, independent San Antonio company
that Clear Channel bought less than three years ago. Its annual profits were
in the low six figures in 2000, the year before the purchase, according to a
2001 Forbes magazine interview with BBH founder Stacy King, who recently
left Clear Channel.

BBH, started in 1992, was devoted mainly to science and natural history
exhibitions until Clear Channel infused the operation with the cash to mount
multimillion-dollar art blockbusters as well.

Clear Channel doesn't pretend to have the in-house expertise to curate art
exhibitions, says Peter Radetsky, a former teacher and writer who is the
division's director of creative and content development. "It would be
ludicrous and professional suicide to even try."

Instead, Radetsky says, the company usually hatches ideas for shows, then
turns them over to established scholars and curators to map out the content.

Clear Channel's business plan also emphasizes enlisting national corporate
sponsors that cansolidify an art tour's profitability.

It couldn't find any for the Vatican tour, company officials say, partly
because religion is a subject national advertisers seeking a broad, diverse
audience didn't want to touch and partly because the exhibition, which had
local sponsors in some cities, came together just as the scandals over
sexually abusive American priests were coming to a head.

Touring exhibitions are a small furrow in Clear Channel's field but one from
which profits will grow, says Brian Becker, who as chairman of Clear Channel
Entertainment oversees the corporation's live-event enterprises ó including
rock concerts and motorcycle and monster truck competitions, musicals and
museum shows. "If you pick exhibition content that appeals to a large
portion of the public," he says, "it's a fine business."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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