Clear Channel’s cultural plunge brings mixed reviews

Starting next year, Clear Channel Communications Inc. 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, including Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-North Hollywood), 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 this 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 Sept. 6, 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 that will end in 2007 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 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 Times’ Christopher Knight found it “almost entirely devoid of significant art but awash in decorative paraphernalia ... souvenirs, models ... reproductions and reconstructions.” The show, he lamented, “represents the leading edge of a brave new world -- the corporation as curator.”

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.

Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, is also apprehensive, given the strong turnout the Vatican show has generated and because critics he trusts found the exhibition badly flawed.

“In Cincinnati, they blew the place away in raw attendance. That makes people nervous, because we’re all competing for market,” Vikan says. “Museums like to believe they deal in authenticity. Clear Channel deals in illusion. If they don’t do a good job, it makes the genre to which I belong, the display of art, something less sterling in the public’s eyes.”

Popular appeal a concern

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 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.

Selma Holo, who heads the museum studies program at USC and runs its Fisher Gallery, says there’s nothing inherently wrong with welcoming corporate behemoths bearing blockbusters or with trying to entertain while educating. But museums, she emphasizes, must make sure that the dance is done to a tune that harmonizes popular appeal with artistic quality and scholarly intent.

If Clear Channel does disprove the conventional wisdom about art exhibitions not being profitable, Holo worries that it could critically tilt the balance toward showmanship and mass appeal.

“Does it imply that serious exhibitions will be abandoned to please most of the people most of the time?” she asks.

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

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.”

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, Radetzky says, the company usually hatches ideas for shows, then turns them over to established scholars and curators to map out the content. It hired Rene Yanez, a veteran artist and curator from San Francisco, to help organize the Chicano shows.

Clear Channel’s business plan also emphasizes enlisting national corporate sponsors that can solidify 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. Mark Greenberg, executive vice president of Clear Channel Exhibitions, says the show nevertheless has made money at each stop. He wouldn’t say how much.

The elaborate set pieces in the Vatican show -- models of St. Peter’s tomb and the scaffold from which Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel -- bother purists who think they divert attention from the actual artworks. But Clear Channel officials and some museum authorities think that such theatrics, if well executed, can complement the art and help immerse viewers in the subject.

What most concerns museum officials is Clear Channel’s use of replicas of art objects, which they say goes against the museum’s essential purpose of collecting and showing artists’ actual handiwork. Radetsky says that of the nearly 400 pieces in the Vatican show, three are copies and are clearly identified as such. He says they were included because the originals, among them a 520-year-old marble frieze depicting St. Peter’s crucifixion, were too fragile to travel but were deemed essential to the show’s theme.

Radetsky insists that Clear Channel Exhibitions harbors no barbarians tromping toward the gates of museum integrity. “Some of these worries are a matter of taste, not appropriateness,” he says.

Culture and economics

Even if there is a certain “tackiness” factor and show-biz impetus to corporate-organized, profit-motivated shows such as Clear Channel’s, the public stands to benefit, says Arthur C. Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School who studies the economics of culture. “If more people are seeing more art, it’s going to be really hard to convince me that’s bad,” Brooks says.

Moreover, accepting a Clear Channel blockbuster can help solidify a museum’s fiscal foundation. Usually, museums pay a “participation fee” to acquire a touring exhibition. The fee for “Eternal Egypt,” a blockbuster of ancient treasures from the British Museum that’s on the road in North America, is $1 million for a 12-week run, according to Heidi Riegler, a spokeswoman for American Federation of Arts, the venerable New York City-based nonprofit exhibition company that organized the show.

Clear Channel’s Vatican show, by contrast, required no upfront fees, and Heath Fox, acting director of the San Diego Museum of Art, says his institution expects to reap $600,000 to $700,000 from its share of the receipts, with ticket prices going as high as $18. Clear Channel will pay an additional $800,000 or so to cover the museum’s extra staffing costs and other special expenses related to a big show with projected attendance of 150,000 to 175,000 people -- many of them newcomers the museum can try to convert into regular attendees.

The arrangement was similar when Clear Channel sent an exhibition about the Titanic to the California Science Center in Los Angeles last year.

“They’re the ones taking the financial risk,” says the science center’s president, Jeffrey Rudolph. “We were assured we were going to get back all our costs before they got anything. And that, frankly, is quite appealing.”

Issues of high culture versus popular appeal, of purity of mission versus corporate profit imperatives, don’t intrude when Clear Channel dances with nonprofit theatrical presenters. Subscription series of Broadway musicals exist at performing arts centers mainly to please a large public and rake in middlebrow bucks.

And those who don’t partner with the highly competitive Clear Channel risk having their toes stepped on. Even some producing and presenting peers who view the corporation’s New York-based theatrical division in a friendly light confess to discomfort about Clear Channel’s sheer reach.

The empire has grown this year, as Clear Channel poured $38 million into refurbishing the Opera House, a long-dormant old hall in Boston, and signed a long-term, $8-million deal to run a newly restored venue in Baltimore. Last month came the announcement that Clear Channel would produce a shortened but lavishly staged “Phantom of the Opera” as a permanent attraction at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas.

‘Degree of caution’ advised

Clear Channel also has been a producing partner in about 20 plays and musicals on Broadway since 2001-- including “The Producers,” “Hairspray” and “Movin’ Out.” It presents those shows, as well as others in which it has no investment, on the road, where it has amassed a core audience of more than 300,000 subscribers. Many of the partners in Clear Channel’s “Broadway Across America” network are nonprofit presenters; the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa is Clear Channel’s longtime theater bastion in Southern California.

What would happen if all those tentacles, poking into so many shows and so many markets, started grasping for a bigger cut of the take than Clear Channel’s partners would care to share?

“All of us have to have a degree of caution. You can’t look at somebody who’s that big a player and not think it’s a matter of concern,” says Tom Viertel, an independent Broadway producer who has partnered with Clear Channel on some shows and who relies on its road venues to book others. He gives its theatrical division high marks for savvy and a “nondisruptive, nonconfrontational” way of doing business.

Clear Channel has the power to damage a show’s chances on the road by not booking it, but other presenters and producers say touring musicals can survive if they pick up enough dates on a rival circuit of about 40 markets known as the Independent Presenters Network. Among the berths controlled by IPN members are the Ahmanson Theatre in L.A. and the Nederlander Organization’s Broadway series in Los Angeles and San Diego. Ultimately, industry insiders say, Clear Channel will embrace any show that becomes a proven earner.

Scott Zeiger, chief executive of Clear Channel’s North American theatrical division, dismisses the notion that his company aims for a level of dominance that would enable it to dictate terms.

“We’re good at our jobs, and it’s ridiculous if the fact we’re a large company makes people nervous,” he said. “People are going to make a lot of money with us. Why is that bad?”

For a number of performing arts venues, in fact -- as for museums that have hosted its art shows and science exhibits -- Clear Channel’s cultural investments provide welcome ballast amid a turbulent economy that has left many an arts institution awash in deficits.

In Costa Mesa, the Orange County Performing Arts Center’s president, Jerry Mandel, says he couldn’t be happier with Clear Channel. The Broadway musicals and children’s productions it steers to Segerstrom Hall typically net $1 million a year or more for the center, he says -- money used to subsidize an acclaimed ballet series. With a second hall just for classical music set to open in 2006, the center’s ongoing economic health will depend greatly on being able to boost Broadway offerings to fill newly opened gaps in the Segerstrom schedule.

With that challenge ahead, Mandel is glad that Clear Channel, which donated $1 million toward the new hall’s construction, is an ally.

He also knows what can happen when Clear Channel is a competitor. He notes, for instance, how Broadway-derived income dwindled at Boston’s nonprofit Wang Center for the Performing Arts after Clear Channel went on a Beantown theater-acquisition binge and commandeered all the hot shows.

That makes Mandel glad about another thing: the non-compete agreement in his institution’s 10-year deal with Clear Channel. “They’re a very big company,” he says. “They could build another venue.”