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        I just sent this message, but left the wrong subject heading on the
message. Sorry.

> 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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