Ringleader of the Arts

“Fantastic,” said J. Carter Brown, breezing into a hotel in Century City and greeting his interviewer as if he couldn’t wait to talk about his current projects. Animated enthusiasm and high energy have always been among his strong suits and, in that regard at least, the art world impresario hasn’t changed a bit.

At 62, Brown’s curly hair may be turning gray, but since stepping down in 1992 as director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington after a 23-year tenure, he seems to be more on-the-scene than ever. As always, his mission is to bring high culture to the people.

He currently devotes most of his time to leading and promoting Ovation, a new fine arts cable television network--not yet available in Los Angeles--and directing “Rings: Five Passions in World Art,” the central exhibition of the 1996 Olympic Arts Festival. The show--featuring about 125 artworks spanning 75 centuries--will open July 4 and run through Sept. 29 at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Among ongoing commitments, Brown chairs the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, a powerful review board for the District of Columbia’s public art and architecture, and serves as senior advisor to Corbis Corp., founded in 1989 by Microsoft chief Bill Gates to create new uses and markets for digital content. With Brown’s help, Corbis is building a massive digital archive including images of artworks in collections of major museums.

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Working in yet another capacity on a recent trip to Los Angeles, Brown fulfilled ceremonial duties as chairman of the jury for the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, awarded this year to Jose Rafael Moneo of Spain.

Brown has so many balls in the air that he seems to be engaged in a precarious juggling act, but he sees his various jobs as a reflection of his lifelong love of all the arts.

“When I was interviewed for the National Gallery, [then-director] John Walker asked me what I wanted to do with my life,” Brown said. “I told him I’d like to make an institution a kind of cultural center for its community. . . . He said, ‘That’s great. How would you like to do it for the nation?’ So I did. At the National Gallery I wrote some film and got involved with drama and dance in our outreach programs. The gallery has an assistant director for music and its own orchestra.

“I have always been involved in all those things,” Brown said. “But now I feel that I am really doing what I told John Walker I wanted to do. Ovation is bringing all the arts right into people’s living rooms.”

“Rings,” on the other hand, brings art to a city overrun with sports fans. The $3.2-million exhibition presents a multicultural array of works in sections devoted to five emotions--love, anguish, awe, triumph and joy. It also has a soundtrack, with “selections of world music that reinforce the emotions of each of the rings,” Brown said.

Ranging from pre-Columbian ceramics to a video installation by contemporary artist Bill Viola, the artworks include such landmarks as Auguste Rodin’s marble sculpture “The Kiss” and Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream.”

On loan from Los Angeles are two items from the County Museum of Art, Pablo Picasso’s “Study for Guernica (Mother With Dead Child)” and an Indian figure, “Siva as Lord of the Dance (Nataraja).” The J. Paul Getty Museum has contributed a Greek vessel, “Panathenaic Prize Amphora,” and a Cycladic sculpture, “Seated Male Figure With Harp.”

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The show has been criticized for being politically correct, mixing major and minor artworks, organizing art according to emotions and transporting fragile treasures to a public spectacle. But “Rings” also has defenders.

Robert Rosenblum, a professor at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, said he discovered “a whole new bag of tricks and surprising sequences” when he lectured on the exhibition at the High Museum in April. “I don’t want to live in this world of five emotions forever,” he said in a telephone interview. But considering the artworks in a new context was refreshing, he said.

“Although I really can’t speak about the show without seeing it, the table of contents is staggering in terms of the international grandeur and quality of the objects,” Rosenblum said. “Carter is probably the only person with the power to pull this off. I can’t think of any other ex-director or now-director who has the cachet to have gotten these loans. It seems like a once-in-a-century opportunity to put together--on a slightly shaky premise--all these masterpieces, and I don’t see why not.

“I suspect a lot of people will be very grumpy about it. It seems like a show without a point--we’ve been calling it Carter’s five-ring circus--but it does have a point. It’s not often that we can see all these major artworks together,” Rosenblum said.

Brown has heard all the complaints. “The show is going to stretch people,” he said. “You really have to put behind you all your knee-jerk preconceptions about what an art exhibition is up to. So many of them are driven by bringing together things that are as nearly alike as possible to study them and show the differences.

“This purposely goes 180 degrees the other way. It combines stuff that’s as disparate as possible to see if the emotions they were chosen to evoke can bring a unity out of all this diversity. So it’s high risk, but I think the reward is commensurate because a lot of people haven’t really remembered why was this stuff was created in the first place.”

If Brown’s personal wishes come true, the exhibition will not only be viewed as a watershed, it will have a second life as a program on Ovation. If so, “Rings” will join a repertoire that includes “Modern Painters,” a Santa Fe Opera production based on the life of Victorian art critic and social reformer John Ruskin, and “Distant Echoes: Yo-Yo Ma and the Kalahari Bushmen,” a documentary of the celebrated cellist’s exploration of South African music.

“All the arts, all the time” is how Brown describes the new network. The brainchild of Harold E. Morse, who founded the Learning Channel in 1980, Ovation was launched on April 21 as the only television network dedicated exclusively to the visual and performing arts. Brown joined Morse as co-founder of Ovation in 1992. A $20-million financing package was completed in February, with Time Warner Cable, the New York Times, the Howard Heinz Endowment and J.P. Morgan, an investment firm, among major backers.

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Currently aired through cable system operators and video dial-tone providers, Ovation reaches several hundred thousand homes 20 hours a day, seven days a week, Brown says. In addition, a two-hour block of Ovation programs is available to about 10 million homes on Sunday mornings on Tele-Communications Inc.’s Intro Television.

A shortage of available cable channels has severely limited Ovation’s distribution, but the network is positioned to reach a broader audience when new technology is available, Brown says. The first break is expected in about a year.

“There are these set-top boxes being manufactured now that will digitize the signal and allow digital compression,” said Brown, “which basically gives you eight channels for every channel you get now.”

Despite reports on the graying of the arts audience, he contends that more Americans attend arts events than sports events. “The market is there. Study after study shows this. Polls that talk to parents about what they want their kids exposed to get an almost universal response--96% or something--that they want them exposed to the arts and humanities. So far, they are not getting a lot of it, but the dream of Ovation is to be there for the channel-surfers,” he said.