The Lure of the Blockbuster

One of the first exhibitions the Museum of Contemporary Art organized when it opened its warehouse space in Little Tokyo was a sprawling $700,000 survey meant to demonstrate the effect of the automobile on the creation of important 20th century art. Oddly enough, 1984’s “The Automobile and Culture” demonstrated just the opposite: The effect of the horseless carriage on painting and sculpture was virtually nil. Pretty much all cars, no culture, the lackluster show was a critical flop.

It was also a popular success. One hundred eighty thousand people streamed through the doors during the lengthy run--a healthy average of some 1,200 daily visitors to a then-rarely visited part of downtown.

Next up at MOCA was a terrific mid-career retrospective of important L.A. Conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg, modestly budgeted at $55,000. He first came to attention around 1969 with such eccentric projects as a cafe and hotel that functioned as actual businesses and, simultaneously, fictive works of art. The show’s knockout piece consisted of 20 big canvases on which the artist had handwritten the entire text of Oscar Wilde’s illustrious 1890 novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Wilde insisted that life should imitate art, not the other way around--a philosophy reflected in Ruppersberg’s quirky cafe and hotel. His sprawling homage on canvas transformed the tidy dictum into a mind-bending meditation.

MOCA’s attendance promptly plummeted, cut almost in half.

I thought of those two exhibitions the other day, when I was making a final visit to MOCA’s “Andy Warhol Retrospective” during its last week. (The show closed Sunday.) You might think a Warhol show represents the best of both worlds--quality art with popular appeal--and on one level it does. On a Tuesday morning the galleries were packed, while lines of waiting visitors stretched down Grand Avenue. (Over the last six days, it was averaging 5,000 visitors a day.) And the carefully paced installation was wonderful, populated with excellent examples and offering a rare opportunity for L.A.’s art audience to reassess the paintings of a pivotal artist of the postwar era.

Still, despite loving the show, I was made somewhat queasy by the enterprise. Not since “The Automobile and Culture” fiasco 18 years ago has an art exhibition at MOCA been so baldly contrived as a commercial entertainment.

First MOCA’s notorious 2001 billboard and TV ad campaign, whose Conceptual Lite cute-isms alienated art enthusiasts all over town. Now this.

The significance of the art was never the principal motivation for booking the Warhol show, merely a supporting requirement. Nor was covering costs--nearly $3 million--the goal. The show’s priority was making money, for MOCA and the city.

Final tallies are coming in (see box, F5), but it does seem to have done that. To which I say: Who cares? Since when should we give a hoot whether a not-for-profit museum has made a profit?

The profit-driven blockbuster mentality isn’t new, of course. Ever since King Tut’s touring tomb relics became a national craze 25 years ago, blockbusters have mushroomed into a staple of our cultural life. Indeed, the current exhibition at Washington’s National Gallery of Art--”The Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egypt”--is a kind of silver anniversary of Tut-mania. By most reports the show is more concerned with ethnology than art history, but its tour of U.S. museums is scheduled to ramble on for at least five years. Americans do love their mummies.

“We hope the show will drive you to come and visit Egypt,” that country’s ambassador explained to the Washington Post about Cairo’s willingness to extend such unusually lengthy loans. In the wake of Sept. 11, tourist-starved Washington no doubt harbors similar hopes. Tourists are any blockbuster’s lifeblood--which is why MOCA partnered with the L.A. Convention and Visitors Bureau to sell the show to regional summer tourists.

Yet, tourists are a flimsy visitor base for almost all art museums. Paris, Florence, New York--only if a city is already identified with art in the mind of the general public can its art museums count on general tourist income to fuel operations. Eight million New Yorkers aren’t enough to make its art museums thrive without the international tourist trade--which is why they’re struggling post-Sept. 11.

Until the past year, Manhattan’s art museums were a glorious aberration. You might say they’re currently grappling with the ordinary dilemma faced every day by art museums in every other American city: not just how to run a lively, compelling program when the base constituency is primarily local--but how to afford it.

MOCA has a mixed record on that count. You’d be hard-pressed to name another contemporary art museum with a better lineup, year in and year out. But sometimes the museum seems to think its primary audience lives in the art capitals of Europe, not L.A.

Why? Because museum curators know there are lots more professional colleagues out of town than in town; with an eye on their careers, they play to it. But most of the art public is composed of amateur enthusiasts, not professionals. Locally they’re the folks who become museum members, visit commercial galleries now and then, seek out art when they travel and generally enjoy the experience. Creating a program that satisfies all art constituencies--professional and amateur, local and not--is the challenge.

Tourist-oriented blockbusters, however, represent a tear in the art museum fabric. While the general public is being seduced, the art public is abandoned. “The Automobile and Culture” was pitched toward anyone who’d ever been in a car. “Andy Warhol Retrospective” was pitched toward anyone who’d ever been to the movies.

What’s the harm in that? Nothing in the short term. For an art museum, it’s quick cash. The risk is slow-motion suicide. The general public is where the fast action is, but it certainly won’t stick around for the long haul. Lose the art public through attrition, though, and you might as well close up shop.

Tourist-oriented blockbusters are the art museum equivalent of a bubble economy. In addition to inflated ticket sales and swollen gift shop revenues, membership rosters balloon artificially, as shoppers take advantage of member discounts to see Tut, Van Gogh, Warhol or another celebrity. When the sales extravaganza is over, the balloon loses air.

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, membership nearly doubled in the frenzy over 1999’s pleasant but unremarkable “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs.” From 64,000 it climbed to an astronomical 118,000. Inevitably, membership has since been floating back to earth, now in the vicinity of 75,000.

Quick-cash infusions from the general public do little to mitigate the huge expense involved in servicing that kind of churn in membership, as the museum labors mightily with mailings, special offers and events, to retain its hold on people with little real interest in art. Still, when museum numbers drop, heads must roll. Sources say LACMA’s top staff fund-raiser, vice president for development Katharine De Shaw, took the fall for the Van Gogh bubble; hired just after the show closed, she left the museum in May. It’s standard museum Kabuki, creating a ritualized illusion of sound management.

Meanwhile, a fundamental truth gets papered over. The real money that has always been the bedrock of major art museums is never found in the wallets of the general public--private, civic, corporate or foundation. The real money is in the deep pockets of passionate individual enthusiasts, scattered here and there within the art public. Design a program that regularly privileges a general public over an art public, relying on packaged extravaganzas that chug into town trailing VIP hotel deals, and you’ll never tap that.

The good news about MOCA is the 18-year gap between “The Automobile and Culture” and “Andy Warhol Retrospective.” Plus, the museum doesn’t have a large pool of artist-celebrities from which to draw. Few contemporary artists have Warhol’s star power, which resonates with a general public. Perhaps we can look for the next blockbuster tourist gig somewhere around 2020.

In his “Dorian Gray” preface, Wilde judiciously observed: “We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”

The art museum as tourist trap gives the place a useful job, which it was never meant to have.

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*--* Warhol by the Numbers

For “Andy Warhol Retrospective,” which closed Sunday at 6 p.m., the Museum of Contemporary Art reports the following final statistics, with citywide economic impact figures to be released later by the Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau: Attendance 195,000 Memberships Up by 6,600, from 12,400 to 19,000 Income $5.4 million (contributions and ticket sales) Profit $2.7 million (from contributions and ticket sales) Sales $1.65 million (of Warhol items in museum shop)

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