Festival Stirs Artful Shows of Civic Pride Laguna Beach and San Clemente residents trade barbs as they compete for the right to stage the 68-year-old showcase.

It’s like the Louvre leaving Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art leaving New York, the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn. OK, OK. Let’s not get too dramatic, but for 68 years the Festival of Arts and Laguna Beach have been one, a piece of the same cultural fabric.

An offer to move south to San Clemente, however, could sever that connection. Already, people in Laguna Beach are talking of setting up another art festival if the current one deserts them. Does that mean cloning the Pageant of the Masters, the crown jewel of pomp where people pose as everything from Leonardo’s Christ at the Last Supper to Degas’ lonely little ballerina?

“Nobody has exclusivity on any of this,” said Jonathan Burke, a dean at the Art Institute of Southern California in Laguna Beach. “I don’t think you can copyright this. I’ve got a feeling another group would come in and take its place.”

That’s what many in Laguna Beach are saying. If the Festival of Arts bolts seven miles down the coast, those 5.6 acres on Laguna Canyon Road won’t sit empty. “It will take the city leaders here about three days to reorganize something identical,” said Tom Ahern, president of the Laguna Beach Chamber of Commerce.

There’s more at stake than the cost of makeup.

The Festival of Arts annually attracts 225,000 visitors who spend about $6 million on restaurants, parking and trinkets in the seaside resort. After years of squabbling between the festival and Laguna Beach over the $585,000-a-year rent, San Clemente came through with an offer to lure the festival to a 20-acre site that could be ready by May 2003. Annual rent would begin at $1 and increase to a minimum of $150,000 by 2014.

Laguna Beach officials say they aren’t requiring rent, but festival organizers would still have to pay at least $510,000 a year for “capital improvements” on the site and donations to charity.

San Clemente officials say it’s strictly a business deal.

“It’s not cultural theft,” San Clemente City Manager Michael W. Parness said. “As far as we’re concerned, if it’s not San Clemente, it will be somewhere else.”

Festival President Sherri M. Butterfield said the board of directors would decide in about 10 days which city to call home.

Many see the festival and Laguna Beach as one and the same.

“It’s a part of what Laguna Beach is,” said painter Hedy Buzan, a former festival board member.

The very thought of the move, though, has given some Lagunans--and that doesn’t mean people in Laguna Niguel, Laguna Woods or Laguna Hills, thank you--a chance to up the snide remark quotient and trash their neighbor to the south.

San Clemente? they ask, the place where Richard Nixon decamped after his resignation?

Laguna Beach, after all, isn’t a one-festival town. Across the street from the Festival of Arts are the Sawdust Festival and the Art-A-Fair. When you get into town there are enough restaurants to keep any gourmand happy, and enough galleries to tire anyone’s sensibilities.

And all those artists live there.

So how could the festival move to San Clemente, “the boonies,’ as chamber president Ahern sniffed.

“San Clemente has never been able to and never will be able to support the arts,” said Ken Auster, who has exhibited his landscape paintings at the festival for 22 years.

“There’s a good reason there isn’t a major department store in San Clemente. The only businesses that survive in San Clemente are surf shops and bars.”

What about the Wal-Mart on Avenida Pico?

The good folk of San Clemente, confronted with a similar onslaught of invective from Lagunans at their own City Council meeting this week, simply ignored the remarks.

Besides, Laguna Beach doesn’t have a major department store.

If the traditional curtain closer “Last Supper” does its last sit-down in Laguna Beach, even some of the festival’s most fervent supporters won’t mourn the loss.

“The Pageant of the Masters is what it is, but it’s not the end-all,” Auster said.

He complained that few people show up at the real art show during the day. At night, while the grounds swell with thousands of people who come for the pageant, few are genuine patrons of local artists.

Artists, after all, have to make a living too.

Times correspondent Matt Kieta contributed to this report.