Media firm's museum shows concern some art curators

By Mike Boehm
Los Angeles Times

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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 — 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 — always denied by the corporation — 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 — 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 — 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."