Art for Whose Sake? : Mayor O’Connor Criticized for Ignoring S.D. Arts Leaders in Making Soviet Festival Plans

Preparations for Boston’s three-week “once in a lifetime opportunity” Soviet festival began 14 months before the first curtain was to have been raised. The initial budget was $4 million, and the citizens were assured by the woman who had been the driving force behind it that the festival would put the city on the cultural map.

Instead, “Making Music Together: The American-Soviet Festival Performances” created a large-scale financial crisis last March that required intervention from both the Massachusetts Legislature and the U.S. State Department to avoid the embarrassment of canceling some or all of the festival just one week before it was to begin.

Sarah Caldwell, director of the Opera Company of Boston and the person credited with being the festival’s chief architect, found herself being blamed for everything from cost overruns to poor ticket sales and for exposing Boston to international ridicule.

“Sarah’s Biggest Botch: How Caldwell Almost Blew Glasnost,” was the headline on one newspaper story analyzing the festival’s gimpy start last March.

Is there a lesson in the Boston experience for San Diego’s arts and political leaders, as they mull over Mayor Maureen O’Connor’s proposed San Diego Festival of Soviet Art and Culture?

On Monday, the City Council is scheduled to vote on O’Connor’s request for $3 million of transient occupancy tax money. With the $1 million that has already been committed by philanthropist Joan Kroc, and the $2.25 million the mayor says will come from private donors, San Diego’s festival budget is 50% more than Boston’s, with a lead time that is almost the same.

O’Connor, who has also promised that a Soviet festival will put this city on the cultural map, as well as help break “the cycle of hate” in the world, wants the festival to be held late next fall--13 to 14 months from now.

Organizers of major international festivals held recently in Los Angeles and Calgary, and one coming up in conjunction with the Goodwill Games in Seattle in 1990, say it takes two to four years to put together such an event. Even major exhibitions arranged by such established San Diego institutions as the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Photographic Arts take more time than there is between now and the fall of ’89.

Post-mortems of the Boston festival blamed most of the problems on the short lead time.

“We learned our lesson this time,” Bruce Rossley, Boston’s commissioner of arts and humanities, told The Times. “The festival was a huge artistic success, but there were logistical problems. Mainly, it was the lack of time to plan and promote.”

In what San Diego arts leaders now refer to as the “Old Globe speech,” O’Connor last January declared 1988 as “the year of the arts in San Diego” and announced her intention to see through a festival of Soviet arts and culture in the city.

This summer, she led a delegation of leaders from San Diego’s major arts organizations to the Soviet Union for an 18-day arts and culture scouting trip. She returned with handshake deals for a rare exhibition of Russia’s collection of jeweled Faberge eggs, an exhibition of religious icons, a puppet show and a Soviet production of the pre-Bolshevik opera “Boris Godunov.”

But as the City Council members prepared to vote, they had seen no specific schedule or budget, the festival was without an artistic director, and the vast majority of professional people in the city’s arts community were saying that they had had no

contact with the mayor’s office regarding either the content of a Soviet festival or their willingness to participate.

Does O’Connor have time to pull it off, or is she--as some suggest--using the city and the reputation of its existing artists and organizations as chips with which to gamble on her political future?

In interviews with more than 50 arts leaders, city officials, out-of-town festival organizers, scholars and representatives of federal agencies, the consensus emerged that a successful Soviet arts festival of the scope that O’Connor envisions will indeed put San Diego on the cultural map, but the odds against it being successful in the fall of 1989 are almost prohibitive.

“Right now, I’d say they’d be hard-pressed to pull this off,” said California Ballet Co. director Maxine Mahon, who made the trip to Russia with O’Connor. “I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s” going to be difficult.

“I feel as though there’s a race going on here,” said Jennifer Spencer, a La Mesa artist and arts activist. “Seattle is having a Soviet arts festival right after the mayor’s. To me, it looks like it’s going to be a thrown-together deal here.”

O’Connor has referred to Seattle’s Goodwill Games Festival in competitive terms, proclaiming on her return from Russia that San Diego had beaten “Seattle, the Smithsonian and New York.”

“For once,” she exulted, “San Diego has won!”

The 11 Faberge eggs in Soviet custody are to be joined here by 12 from the much-traveled collection of magazine publisher Malcolm Forbes. Transporting and exhibiting the eggs will, according to the budget proposal submitted to City Council members Thursday, cost $663,100.

The jewel-encrusted Easter eggs, designed in the late 19th Century for Russian czars and the royalty of neighboring Asian and European countries by jeweler Peter Carl Faberge, are prized items in the world of art exhibition. But few people contacted by The Times expect San Diego’s 1989 festival to even remotely rival Seattle’s in 1990.

“The games festival will be the biggest (Soviet-U.S.) exchange ever taken place,” said Jarlath Hume, director of the Goodwill Games Arts Festival, who expressed a “the more, the merrier” attitude about O’Connor’s announcement. However, he said, even after the San Diego festival, Seattle will be able to boast of having more Soviet art than has ever been assembled in an American city.

Hume said the Seattle festival, budgeted at $8 million, has been in the planning for more than two years, and it is still two years away.

“Putting together a high-quality program with the Soviets is not something one can do quickly,” Hume said. “The artistic people need time to think about things. They need time to go over there to meet people, talk with them in depth, come back, and talk to people here who are knowledgeable in Soviet arts. Not just the ministry people.”

The Seattle festival differs in major ways from what is known about the mayor’s plan. It is a two-year-long cultural exchange festival, meaning that the Russians get a shipment of American art and culture in return. The Goodwill Games Festival is partly funded by the United States Information Agency, by order of Congress. Most of the major Russian companies and attractions are being brought over to Seattle as the first stop on major American tours. And it is being held in conjunction with an event--the International Goodwill Games--that will draw the best athletes from the Soviet Union, the United States and about 60 other countries to compete in 22 sports.

Seattle does have an impressive lineup of Russian attractions to go with the games, arts programs that experts say could not be arranged for San Diego by the fall of next year even if there had been no Seattle and no conflicts.

The major Soviet opera and theater companies are booked for worldwide tours through consortiums, such as the Met in New York, by Soviet impresarios. That is how the Orange County Performing Arts Center managed to get the Kirov Ballet for this fall and the Moscow Ballet for next summer. And that’s how Seattle is getting many of its key events.

The problem for San Diego is that the tours are usually booked more than a year in advance, sometimes as many as three years in advance.

Laura Frazer, program officer of the President’s U.S.-Soviet Exchange Initiative at the USIA, said O’Connor was wise to have gone to Russia personally and her show of faith will help lubricate the Soviet bureaucracy’s lumbering arts machinery.

“I’m sure (the Soviets) respect the fact that the mayor went there personally,” Frazer said. “They realize the government is important in getting financial and organizational support. I think that’s why they responded (to her).”

Frazer is a political appointee in a department created to help American cities and institutions carry out cultural exchanges that were endorsed by American and Soviet delegations at the Geneva summit in 1985. That agreement resumed an exchange program that had been halted with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the American withdrawal from the Moscow Olympics of 1980.

Since the new agreement, Frazer said, there has been a proliferation of U.S.-Soviet cultural exchanges, many of them carried out through the sister city programs encouraged by President Reagan. In less than three years, the number of American cities with sister cities in the Soviet Union grew from 6 to 32. Seattle has a strong tie-in with Tashkent, Frazer said. San Diego has yet to pair off, though O’Connor reportedly has her eye on Tbilisi.

Frazer said anyone considering organizing a festival would be wise to use Seattle as an example, both for the schedule it is putting together and the way the organizers have worked with the community.

“They have broad-based community support for all their programs, and the programs range from elite class Soviet arts to citizen groups,” Frazer said. “They’ve been very successful in raising the level of awareness in Seattle about Soviet-U.S. relations.”

Frazer said Seattle set up a human rights committee immediately to listen to the concerns of groups opposed to the festival for political, social or even artistic grounds.

“The way to make any kind of festival successful is to educate the public as much as possible to get community support,” she said. “You shouldn’t exclude anybody. If there are groups opposed to this kind of thing, the mayor’s office should meet with them and see what their grievances are.”

People opposed to the San Diego festival protested at an Aug. 9 City Council meeting, during which the council unanimously approved--in principle--the mayor’s festival concept. Later, Salvatore Giametta and Ben Dillingham, of the mayor’s staff, talked with two of the people who had spoken out against the festival at the City Council meeting. Also, Paul Downey, the mayor’s press secretary, debated a member of the reactionary John Birch Society on a radio show.

But there has been no other contact with festival detractors, and O’Connor personally has spoken to none of them.

The mayor appears to have strong support from the major professional arts organizations in town, but even her supporters say she has failed to communicate specific ideas to them, and the vast majority of arts people contacted by The Times said there has been no communication at all.

“Not to totally discredit her, but the mayor is not qualified (to launch this festival),” said Kenneth Capps, a Carlsbad sculptor. “She needs to rely on professional help. She can’t hope to do a professional job without the maximum input from the local arts professionals who are available to her as resources.”

Concerns in the arts community about the festival and the mayor’s handling of it are numerous. Though people express enthusiasm for an international-caliber festival, they resent not being asked for their input, they are fearful that the event will channel public and corporate funds away from their programs, and some believe that the mayor--by her own admission, not knowledgeable about the arts--has simply seized the festival as a convenient political symbol.

“The only explanation I have for the mayor’s actions is that the Russian festival will look good on her resume when she runs for the Senate,” said Kim Cox, a KSDS-FM deejay who acknowledges his bitterness over the city’s refusal to support San Diego Friends of Old-Time Music, of which he is president. “In the meantime, San Diego’s home-grown arts scene goes either under-funded or non-funded.”

Artist Jennifer Spencer, who is critical of the timing for the festival but not of the concept, expressed dismay at the approach taken by the mayor and wondered, “Why is she ramming and jamming this through City Hall? It has extremely strong political implications here for her, for whatever reason, without much care or consideration for how it affects anything else.”

O’Connor had written two commentaries on her reasons for wanting the festival. One was published as a commentary in the San Diego Union, the other was edited and published as a letter to the editor in The Times. Otherwise, since returning from the Soviet Union, she had maintained a general media silence about the specifics of the festival and for the last three weeks, according to Downey, she “was too busy” to be interviewed for this article.

Thursday, the city manager delivered the proposed festival budget, under the title “San Diego Arts Festival: Treasures of the Soviet Union,” to the eight City Council members at noon. It was prepared by festival administrative director Bruce Herring, who was appointed last month. After repeated requests, O’Connor agreed to a 20-minute telephone interview Thursday morning to discuss that and other issues raised in this story (see separate stories on the budget and O’Connor’s comments).

Many officials of the leading arts organizations, including some who were with O’Connor on her Soviet trip, would only discuss their concerns about the festival with the assurance of anonymity. Their organizations, they said, depend on city funds and they didn’t want to risk punitive cut-offs.

“Many organizations feel coerced because they’re afraid of losing their TOT (transient occupancy tax) funding,” said Jim Barker, an art lecturer at San Diego State University. “One person said to me, ‘When the mayor’s office calls you, you go down there whether you support the issue or not because you don’t want to jeopardize your funding.’ ”

Barker said that, because of the short lead time and the small amount of planning that has been done, the festival can backfire on San Diego in the same way Sarah Caldwell’s festival backfired in Boston. He said O’Connor has badly mishandled public relations for the event by ignoring most of the arts community and said he thinks that she has grossly underestimated the cost of a festival the size she envisions.

But Barker saved his strongest criticism for the concept of the festival itself.

“This is being called a Soviet arts festival . . . Russian icons and Faberge eggs are not Soviet art. The Russian eggs were made for the czars in pre-Soviet Russia . . . Because religion is not officially recognized (in the U.S.S.R.), the icons are not examples of Soviet art.”

Beeb Salzer, a drama professor at SDSU, said the selections announced so far render irrelevant O’Connor’s claim that the festival will reduce hatred between Americans and Soviets.

“The art that’s being proposed is czarist art, not modern Russian Soviet art,” Salzer said. “I’ve encountered very little hatred of czarist Russians in San Diego.”

The problem that Barker, Salzer and others have with a sanctioned Soviet festival is that the festival, by definition, is censored--there will be no avant-garde art here, nothing by dissident artists.

Kenneth Capps, a contemporary artist, said that what has been announced or talked about so far “seems very superficial and non-immediate Soviet art.” He said of the Faberge egg collection that it has “a gift shop tone to it,” and that if the festival does not bring in examples of top contemporary art, it will be a misrepresentation that will not do justice to either country.

“Who did they (O’Connor) talk to?” Capps asked. “If they only went to the Kremlin and talked to bureaucrats, that’s what they’ll end up with: bureaucratic art.”

The void left is one that San Diego political activists Sharon Unkefer and Debra Schettino are eager to fill.

Schettino, who works for Free Afghanistan Alliance, a group that provides aid for Afghan refugees in this country, proposed a Freedom Arts Festival at the Aug. 9 City Council meeting. Unkefer, a business consultant, was at the meeting, too, and called former Mayor Roger Hedgecock, who has a call-in radio show on KSDO.

Hedgecock and Unkefer talked about the Freedom Arts Festival idea on the air. Hedgecock said there was a strong response from listeners in favor of the Freedom Festival and it has continued to be a topic brought up by his on-air callers.

Schettino and Unkefer are vague about their plans for funding and attractions that they might include in their festival, which would run concurrent with the city’s event. But the idea, they said, is to have a forum for alternative art that expresses, in any medium, notions of freedom.

The Freedom Fest was given whatever momentum it has, they said, by the refusal of the city and the mayor’s office to address their concerns.

O’Connor opened herself to general skepticism with her extravagant claims of the festival’s potential impact on both San Diego’s image and its economy. She said it would be a major boost to tourism, comparing it to the San Diego-hosted 1988 Super Bowl. She said it would get coverage in such publications as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and enhance the city’s “public image as a player on the international arts scene.”

The last time San Diego was featured in the Wall Street Journal, it was in an article primarily about the San Diego Unified Port District’s bungling of a pair of public arts projects. The article ridiculed the port commissioners and San Diego (“the town that immodestly calls itself ‘America’s Finest City’ ”) and left the Journal’s readers with the impression that San Diego’s image as the city of “surfing and Sea World” is accurate.

Sea World’s attendance has been dropping lately, but the city’s theater activity has been getting good press throughout the world. Many people in the arts community believe the city is gaining ground on cultural respectability, and they fear that a failed or second-rate festival would set the city back.

The Wall Street Journal’s view of San Diego as the world’s largest bend in the road is shared even by many San Diegans. As one person said in doubting that a festival with highbrow intentions would play here: “There are 100 pairs of overalls sold in Santee for every tuxedo.”

The notion that the festival is good business, that it will hype tourism, was reiterated by the mayor’s supporters on the arts commission, but discounted by most others. Officials of the Boston festival said there was little evidence of increased tourism income there, and to arts people not associated with the major organizations in San Diego, the point is moot anyway.

“Tying it into tourism just doesn’t hold water,” said Tom Corcoran, director of the San Diego Dance Alliance. “Tourists won’t help us. Our programming is too sporadic.”

The primary concern expressed by the smaller arts organizations is that, whatever the festival ends up costing, and however it is paid for, it will divert funds from their ongoing programs.

“We’ve already begun to feel the pinch,” said Diane Annala, director of the San Diego Foundation for the Performing Arts. “We’re being told by major corporate givers that they’ve received calls on behalf of the mayor, and the corporations don’t want to make any commitments until they see how much they’re going to be hit up for.”

Dan Wasil, of the Installation Gallery, said he’s all in favor of a Soviet arts festival, but doesn’t think public funds should be used.

“Next year is Installation’s 10th anniversary and it’s still a struggle for us,” he said. “Anything that’s going to take out of the small pie of TOT funds means less money for us, less money for local concerns and local artists.”

Wasil, and others, think the festival should be covered completely by private money, as the Olympic Arts Festival was in Los Angeles.

“If you can get Marlboro to subsidize the America’s Cup,” he said, “you can get some company to underwrite this.”

Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer agrees.

“I am concerned that all TOT monies remain here to benefit our artists,” Wolfsheimer said. “I’m not naive. When you commission artists, performers, technicians from another country, they want to be paid. I don’t want to pay for transportation for Soviet artists here. . . . I think that the subsidy should be paid for by private concerns . . . our arts need nurturing here first.”

Councilman Bruce Henderson takes it a step farther. He doesn’t want the Soviets to benefit financially in any way.

Henderson aide Jim Sills said the councilman “supports the mayor setting aside funds for a festival if the money goes into the hands of local San Diegans, and not a dime goes back to the Soviet Union--not a ruble, not a kopeck--so that it goes into the local economy and is not lost.”

Councilman Ron Roberts said he is generally supportive of the arts festival. He said he’s convinced that it will bring money to San Diego. His reservations about doing a Soviet festival (“I meet people on the street and they say, ‘Well, you’re for the Soviet arts festival? That means you’re a Communist.’ ”) were offset, he said, by the mayor’s assurance that it was the first in a series and that future festivals would focus on Western countries or those along the Pacific Rim.

The mayor is not hurting for support among the leaders of the high-profile professional organizations. Symphony Executive Director Wesley O. Brustad said the mayor is facing opposition because she’s selling a vision, and “visions are hard to sell.” The La Jolla Playhouse’s Des McAnuff said “moving the world to San Diego” is a great idea and “I’ll support this thing until someone gives me a reason not to.”

Tom Hall, managing director of the Old Globe Theatre, said O’Connor is getting a bum rap on not soliciting advice from local experts. He said she has consulted him about a Soviet wish list, and he has given it to her.

If he could have anything, Hall said, he would bring in the Maly Theatre production of “Brothers and Sisters,” a seven-hour piece featuring 55 cast members. He said it would cost about $600,000 for a two-week run at the Old Globe and, he said, it would give San Diego a major image boost.

“If we host the Maly, the implication would be clear,” Hall said. “It shows where we are in the hierarchy of arts and culture. I’m not sure we can (get it), but if New York couldn’t and San Diego could, you can taste the headlines.”

Arts people operating at a different level from the Old Globe say they are less concerned with San Diego’s international reputation than with their own struggle to survive.

“I have a theater right now that needs $100,000 to stay alive and there’s no money anywhere,” said Ralph Elias, who manages the Bowery Theater. “I’m one of the artistic proletariat. The closer you work to the peon level, the more you resent the festival.”

“There are people who would complain with a free automobile,” said Milton Fredman, chairman of the city arts commission. “They’d say, ‘Why isn’t the gas tank filled?’ ”

Fredman said criticism of the festival is premature, that there won’t be anything to criticize until the City Council approves funding. But to the arts people who have been shut out of the small circle of arts leaders involved in designing the budget released Thursday, complaining after it’s funded will be too late.

“There needs to be a real concrete convention among people who would be involved in the festival to decide what is the overall objective,” said Sam Woodhouse, of the San Diego Rep. “The Soviet Union is a mammoth country. Are we going to showcase the old Russia or the new Russia? Are we going to showcase a country that is pre-glasnost or post-glasnost? The whole country is torn between two impulses. They haven’t sorted it out yet.”

That the mayor would go to the City Council and ask for $3 million for a festival with no director, no specific budget and no program incenses some of those arts leaders who annually face the council with armloads of detail.

“If one of our arts organizations got up and put forth a proposal saying, ‘We can’t tell you what and we don’t know when, and we’re not sure how much,’ we’d be laughed out of the place,” said San Diego Dance Alliance’s Corcoran, who supports the festival concept. “If the city had to back up its proposals like we have to, things would be a lot different.”

Many people contacted by The Times had grave concerns about the festival being tied to the mayor.

“It’s unhealthy that it’s being regarded as the ‘mayor’s festival,’ ” said Dan Wasil of the Timken Gallery. The L.A. festival’s associate director, Tom Schumacher, said bluntly that no festival should be run or overseen by politicians.

“I think when a festival comes out of City Hall, boy, you’re going to confuse the agenda of a festival,” Schumacher said. “A festival should come out of a director (from the art community).”

“In my experience, arts events have to be planned with a particular perspective, an artistic vision by people in the arts,” said Suzanne Townsend of San Diego Performances, a company that books arts events for the city. “A lot of different formats have been used for festivals, but I don’t know of anywhere the mayor was the prime mover.”

In any event, the San Diego Soviet Arts and Culture Festival is permanently linked with Maureen O’Connor. As one arts person said ruefully, “It’s her party and most of us weren’t invited.”

The symbol for the mayor’s party has become the Faberge egg.

“The Faberge egg is the perfect symbol for the festival,” said the Bowery’s Elias. “The mentality that spent all that money creating those eggs brought on a revolution. Here, maybe it will just bring down a mayor.”

SAN DIEGO SOVIET ARTS FESTIVAL (1989)

LENGTH: 4 weeks

FREQUENCY: Triennial

NUMBER OF PERFORMANCES: 19 events; performances to be determined

ORGANIZER: A specially created nonprofit organization

STAFF: 2

PLANNING LEAD TIME: 18 months

ESTIMATED COST: $6.25 million

INCOME: $6.25 million

City transient occupancy tax funds: $3 million

Kroc gift: $1 million

Other contributions and ticket sales: $2.25 million

LOS ANGELES FESTIVAL (1987)

LENGTH: 25 days

FREQUENCY: Triennial

NUMBER OF PERFORMANCES: 177

ORGANIZER: Los Angeles Festival, a nonprofit organization

STAFF: 6 permanent, 676 seasonal (including 248 volunteers)

PLANNING LEAD TIME: 3 years

COST: $5.9 million

INCOME: $6 million

Earned income: $1.7 million

Contributed income: $4.3 million

SURPLUS/(DEFICIT): $94,000

AVERAGE CAPACITY: 85%

MAKING MUSIC TOGETHER FESTIVAL (1988) BOSTON

LENGTH: 23 days

FREQUENCY: One time

NUMBER OF PERFORMANCES: 75

ORGANIZER: A specially created nonprofit organization

STAFF: 322

PLANNING LEAD TIME: 14 months

COST: $3.48 million

INCOME: $3.17 million

Earned income: $1.54 million

Contributed income: $1.63 million (includes $200,000 loan from state legislature)

SURPLUS/(DEFICIT): ($310,000)

AVERAGE CAPACITY: Unavailable

GOODWILL GAMES ARTS FESTIVAL, SEATTLE (1990)

LENGTH: 4 weeks

FREQUENCY: One time

NUMBER OF PERFORMANCES: 120

ORGANIZER: A specially created nonprofit organization

STAFF: 12

PLANNING LEAD TIME: 4 years

ESTIMATED COST: $8 million

INCOME:$8 million

Estimated earned income: $5 million

Estimated contributed income: $3 million

This story was reported by Hilliard Harper, Elaine Pofeldt, Leah Ollman, Kenneth Herman, Eileen Sondak, Nancy Churnin.