Pops May Have Missed Out on Some Guaranteed Cash

Did the San Diego Symphony’s management miss a crucial trick? Four weeks into its outdoor Summer Pops concerts, the symphony introduced discounted group packages and mini-subscriptions for Wednesday and Thursday concerts, a move aimed at increasing critically low sales.

No one was more surprised by the sales slump than executive director Wesley O. Brustad, who based his projections on the 1986 sales volume. With one exception, Brustad patterned the 1988 Summer Pops after the 1986 season, the last time the symphony produced the pops.

The exception was a program, dropped this year, in which nonprofit organizations “guaranteed” a minimum $22,400 for a Wednesday or Thursday concert. The nonprofit group used the program as a fund-raiser, selling the tickets and keeping any money over the $22,400 figure, which was the symphony’s nightly cost of operations, said Chuck Love, former symphony marketing director.

The program served everyone, allowing the symphony to cover its costs on slow nights, and nonprofit charities to net as much as $15,000 to $20,000 a concert, Love said. He added that about 60% to 65% of the Wednesdays and Thursdays were guaranteed by groups such as Home of Guiding Hands, Catholic Community Services, Episcopal Community Services and Mercy Hospital.

Brustad, new to the pops this year, vetoed the program, saying: “We never did find good figures on it. All we have is subjective responses.”

He was incredulous, however, when told the dollar figure of the guarantee. “They’d agree to pay $22,400? I don’t have that in my sales reports. I wish they were firmly in my ticket reports. They’re not.”

Meanwhile, the nonprofit-guarantor program has resurfaced with San Diego Performances, run by former symphony board member Suzanne Townsend. And Love, who is now executive director of the Easter Seal Society, says the society will guarantee the opening night here of the San Francisco Ballet’s “The Nutcracker.”

What is this madness? Having bilged the two winning proposals--by Roberto Salas and Vito Acconci--in their own public art contests, commissioners of the San Diego Unified Port District now say they will consider using the unspent funds to finance Mayor Maureen O’Connor’s Soviet arts festival. Seems the port commissioners don’t mind supporting art, as long as they don’t have to look at it.

According to published reports, Commissioners William Rick, Raymond Burk and Louis Wolfsheimer believe contributing the district’s arts funds to the proposed Soviet festival is a “logical” idea as long as some of the fest activities slosh over onto district lands--i.e., the convention center now under construction.

And, if there’s a problem rechanneling funds because of the restrictive language of the district’s stated policy on public art, then the words can be changed to “encompass the desire of the port,” Burk was quoted as saying. Incredible!

To extend this line of thinking, the Port District can do literally anything as long as it pleases the commission members. Instead of finishing the convention center, for instance, they could take the $150 million budgeted for the center and buy a TV station. Television, after all, is more profitable, more popular and it doesn’t pollute anything, except brains.

The commissioners’ offhand attitude indicates that they see the arts as a mere frill to be toyed with. As for supporting the festival, it’s always easier to borrow another city’s or country’s traditions than to create a new tradition of one’s own art. Should the commissioners use the art funds entrusted to them for a festival, they figuratively will be trading permanent Acconcis for very temporary icons.

Readers of this column last week may have detected an error in my assertion that it may be “years” before San Diego commissions its first public artwork. Joyce Selber of the city’s new arts and culture office called to say, ‘Wake up!’ An environmental artwork was commissioned--gulp--last fall.

Artist Christine Oatman, the winner in a Public Arts Advisory Board-sponsored invitational competition, is even now developing designs for a series of animal and plant impressions as part of the landscaping of the Canyonside Recreation Center in the huge Penasquitos Reserve. Construction on the project is scheduled to begin in late 1989 or early 1990.

Selber also pointed out that three other public art projects initiated by the now-defunct arts advisory board are in some phase of development: the City Gates freeway-related artworks, a public-private partnership to develop the Museum of Seasonal Change in Doyle Park in the Golden Triangle, and a plan to purchase and permanently install Roberto Salas’ whimsical street signs that are temporarily installed along Park Avenue in Balboa Park.

And now we have Gazelle Enterprises with “An Art Salazar Production” of the movie “Psychobabble,” made right here and opening Friday in America’s (according to Money magazine) 52nd-Finest City. Well, actually Otay Mesa. Salazar, a promotion-minded graduate of UC San Diego, claims to be “the Steven Spielberg of this town.” According to his press release, Salazar is a producer-writer-director who comes in on time and on budget and has been “consistently doing so for the past 10 years.” Not surprising for someone whose own press release describes him as an “unbridled young genius,” or considering his age.

In 1978, Salazar was 12 years old.