L.A. to Draw on Van Gogh as Tourist Lure

One year after the unveiling of the celebrated Getty Center, Los Angeles will again capture the attention of the art world, this time with a major Van Gogh exhibition that will also highlight efforts to market Southern California as a significant cultural destination--and hopefully pump more tourism-generated revenue into the region’s economy.

To whet appetites among out-of-town art lovers for a city better known for “Baywatch” than ballet, local hotels and museums have joined forces with corporate sponsors and others in a $1.5-million national marketing blitz to draw visitors to Los Angeles for both the Van Gogh show and a spin-off tour showcasing other fine-arts venues in the area.

The marketing push is considered one of the biggest ever for a single art exhibition. And why not? The 70-piece “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs: Masterpieces from the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam,” which opens Jan. 17 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is considered something of a cultural coup. Los Angeles is one of just two cities to host the collection, the largest assemblage of Van Gogh’s work to travel outside the Netherlands in 25 years. Some of the works have never before been seen in the United States.

Among the canvases to be shown are the artist’s seminal “Potato Eaters” and his last work, “Wheatfield With Crows.”

The marketing of Van Gogh is just the latest move in a strategy to use Southern California’s cultural attractions to help boost the average tourist’s stay in the region from three nights to four. The extra day could bring in as much as $1.2 billion in additional revenue for the local economy, said Robert Barrett, director of cultural tourism for the Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau.

“We are hoping we can use culture to make Los Angeles alluring enough that we can get people to stay one more day with us,” Barrett said.

Even before its opening, the Van Gogh exhibition is drawing attention from arts and tourism experts. Jerry Kappel, director of development for the American Assn. of Museums, called the campaign to promote the exhibition a “benchmark for cultural tourism.”

“It’s probably the largest marketing effort for a single exhibition,” he said.

Encouraging so-called cultural tourism has become popular nationwide as civic boosters look for ways to maximize the leisure-time draw of their cities and regions. These days, cultural travelers are an especially hot commodity. According to a recent study by the Travel Industry Assn. of America, vacationers who include cultural activities in their trips tend to stay longer at their destinations and spend more money than tourists who do not.

“What cultural tourism does is provide more product for the travel industry,” said Kappel, whose group represents roughly 3,000 museums nationwide.

Packaging Southern California as a cultural mecca received a major lift last year with the opening of the $1-billion Getty Center.

Widespread media coverage surrounding the center’s architecture and its highly touted art collections helped plant the idea of Los Angeles as a cultural hot spot in many minds, said John Morey of Wyoming-based Morey & Associates, a marketing research firm specializing in cultural attractions.

“The opening of the Getty Center caused a lot of excitement for people,” Morey said. “When you have a world-class museum open like that, it can’t do anything but help raise L.A’s stature as a cultural center.”

Since its December 1997 debut, the Getty has attracted nearly 2 million visitors, officials said, with about 60% of them coming from outside Los Angeles County.

The Van Gogh exhibition, which will run 11 weeks at LACMA West, the museum’s annex in the landmark former May Co. department store at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, has for the moment taken the Getty’s place as the area’s cultural star of the hour. Museum officials are expecting 600,000 to attend the show.

In advance of the exhibition, the visitors bureau, the city’s Cultural Affairs Department and American Express have launched a print media campaign that is expected to reach roughly 11 million people nationwide through ads in seven national magazines and newspapers. Another 50,000 ads have been earmarked for direct mail to American Express cardholders.

Ads, running now through January, range from black-and-white newspaper displays to full-color, eight-page inserts, all offering free admission to anyone booking a night at one of eight hotels participating in the campaign. In addition, LACMA has mailed 1.3 million circulars offering two exhibition tickets in exchange for every new membership to the museum.

Tourism officials hope the campaign will touch a chord among art lovers, given the exhibition’s resounding popularity at its first stopover at the National Gallery in Washington. The display, which opened Oct. 4 and is free, has drawn nearly 5,000 visitors a day. Roughly 450,000 people are expected to see the show there before it closes Jan. 4.

In Los Angeles, the event has already been heralded as the most celebrated exhibition to visit the region since the major Impressionist show “A Day in the Country,” which drew 460,000 to LACMA in 1984.

Already the exhibition has sold more than 170,000 tickets, which, at $17.50 to $20 apiece, are considered the priciest ever for a museum show in the U.S.

The Convention & Visitors Bureau hopes to steer many Van Gogh admirers to other cultural destinations in the area by offering a self-guided tour of his works and others by his contemporaries that are in permanent collections at the Getty Center, the Huntington Library, the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and the Norton Simon Museum.

“If people are coming to see the Van Gogh exhibit, why not come check us out too,” said Sara Campbell, director of art at the Norton Simon.

Campbell said she welcomes the effort because her museum is frequently overlooked by Los Angeles-bound visitors because of its Pasadena address. “It’s just a great opportunity to let people know we are here.”

Tourism is the region’s third-largest revenue generator behind business services and health care. But visitors are spending less time in the greater Los Angeles and Orange counties area than they did just a few years ago, when the average stay was five nights.

Growing competition from Las Vegas and other Western destinations has steadily siphoned much of Southern California’s tourist trade. Tourism officials are looking to everything from high-brow museums to vibrant contemporary art galleries to help reverse that.

“To ignore this is to ignore a major economic force in the area,” said Andrea Rich, president and chief executive of LACMA. “We have a lot to promote.”

LACMA itself plans to spend an undisclosed sum to promote the Van Gogh exhibit in Los Angeles’ major tourist feeder markets such as San Francisco, Denver and Phoenix.

In conjunction with the print media campaign, more than 50,000 fliers touting the Van Gogh hotel/ticket package have been sent to tour promoters on the West Coast and in other countries, including Mexico, Argentina and Japan.

Exhibition promoters hope Van Gogh’s popularity will create a visitor bonanza surpassing one that resulted from a highly successful marketing drive two years ago in Philadelphia.

Offering a hotel room/ticket package similar to the one in Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Art Museum and corporate sponsors spent just over $1 million to market a Cezanne exhibition in major East Coat publications. Of the 547,000 people who attended the show, nearly 30,000 had purchased the package. All told, the event pumped roughly $86 million into the local economy.

“We expect to beat that,” Barrett said.

Marketing the Van Gogh show is just one brush stroke on a larger canvas of culture-oriented promotional efforts that began to take shape three years ago when the Los Angeles visitors bureau created a cultural tourism department and hired Barrett to oversee its activities.

Since then, Barrett has spearheaded efforts to showcase the area’s artistic, historic and cultural treasures. In 1996, an exhibition of famous Smithsonian artifacts at the Los Angeles Convention Center anchored a hotel/ticket package similar to the Van Gogh offering. That campaign, a direct-mail effort to 120,000 people, generated an estimated $2.6 million from hotel reservations alone and encouraged cultural exploration beyond the Smithsonian display with free admission to other museums.

More recently, the visitors bureau joined forces with its counterparts in San Diego and San Francisco for a $2.5-million campaign promoting various cultural and ethnic excursions within each of three cities.

Kappel said the Los Angeles efforts have been setting standards for cultural tourism promotion that other cities have just now started to follow. “L.A. has been a leader at looking at its cultural resources in an effort to attract more visitors,” he said.

Barrett is already looking past Van Gogh to his next project promoting day trips to different ethnic neighborhoods in Los Angeles as part of efforts to package the city as a hub of social and cultural innovation for the next century.

“Rome is a city where you look back and discover where you came from,” Barrett said. “L.A. is a city where you look forward and see where you’re going.”