The blockbustering of U.S. museums

When the Cincinnati Museum Center announced its booking last fall of “St. Peter and the Vatican,” the largest exhibition of art from the Vatican ever to be seen in North America, it was front-page news. Douglass McDonald, the museum’s president and chief executive, confidently declared that the “blockbuster” would bring 250,000 people to his nonprofit institution, injecting more than $18 million into the local economy.

One might expect “Vatican,” which opens first in early March in Houston, to have been developed in Rome, or by a government or university, or, at the very least, by an internationally famous museum. But the high-profile exhibition was put together mainly in an anonymous building at an industrial park not far from the airport in San Antonio.

That facility, owned by media conglomerate Clear Channel Communications, intends to be a big part of the future of America’s museums. “Vatican,” which includes 350 pieces drawn from the Vatican museum’s collection, has secured berths at such institutions as the San Diego Museum of Art.

Earlier this month, Clear Channel’s “Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge” began a 15-city tour, originating at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque. An art exhibition drawn primarily from entertainer Cheech Marin’s collection, it includes the work of 26 Latino artists.

Clear Channel’s blockbuster “Titanic” exhibition, which drew more than 1.1 million people in two visits at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, is now in Los Angeles at the California Science Center.

Just as it changed Broadway theater roadshows and the concert business, so Clear Channel is changing the economics -- some would say the soul -- of a museum culture that traditionally has built its own shows or borrowed them from peers. It’s making some institutions look too much like theaters for hire. And it’s a trend that has many old-line museum people worried.

“In the past, companies like this would only go to smaller museums without their own exhibit staffs,” says Gloria Groom, a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. “But in recent years, that’s begun to change. These shows now are going to places that should be creating such shows themselves.”

Others see nonprofit museums as the latest victims of the corporate takeover of American culture. “Our museums are going the way of [family-run] restaurants or family farming,” says Bernard Beck, an associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University. “It’s not so much that we’ve given over control of our culture, but that corporations have become powerful enough to take it.”

Clear Channel, which has a history of dominating every sector in which it does business, believes much of its future growth and profit in entertainment lies within the hallowed walls of America’s science and history centers, museums and art galleries. In almost every case, these institutions are subsidized by taxpayers. Yet Clear Channel cheerfully is deconstructing the traditional distinctions between high art and commercial culture -- the people working on “Vatican” also are putting together an exhibition called “Monster Trucks: Science of the Extreme Machine,” as well as something called “Theme Park.”

“Whether it’s Madonna or a Broadway show, or treasures from the Vatican, it’s all product to us,” says Adam Phillips, Clear Channel Entertainment’s executive vice president for corporate development. “They are all events to which people buy tickets. And we think we can deliver high-quality product better than anyone else.”

Whereas Clear Channel generally leases or licenses the content in its other entertainment businesses, it can develop -- and thus control -- its own content in the exhibition field. Phillips loves that idea -- because it means there’s no equivalent of someone else dictating ticket prices or tour routings.

And inanimate objects don’t cancel, join unions or throw fits. He also smells synergy.

“Can you imagine entertainment with an exhibition component, a theatrical component and a musical component all taking place in somewhere that’s the darling of the local community?” he asks, his voice rising with excitement.

Although it has consistently declared such allegations to be unfair, Clear Channel is the frequent target of competitors, artists and legislators who say its deep pockets and diverse empire give it too much power to dominate all areas of entertainment. Singer Don Henley testified at a Senate committee hearing last month that the company was too influential and used the leverage of its radio empire to force artists to play for Clear Channel promoters in Clear Channel venues. Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.) has charged that Clear Channel had caused concert ticket prices to rise by stifling independent competition.

Blockbuster hook

It’s far too early for such concerns to materialize in the museum business. Especially because it’s clear that America’s museums need Clear Channel just as much as it needs them. During the last decade, museums have hooked their audiences on touring blockbuster exhibits with ever-higher theatrical components. Just as America’s downtown boosters have relied on shows such as “The Lion King” to make the tills ring, so museums now need a “Titanic” on a regular basis. In Cincinnati, research has shown that without a special reason to attend, people will go shopping instead.

“Major touring exhibits are of crucial importance today,” says Sophia Siskel, director of exhibits and educational programs at the Field Museum in Chicago. “They cause big spikes in attendance.” Figures show that unless blockbuster exhibits are booked with some regularity, museum attendance invariably sags, just as it tends to do at a theme park with no new rides. And the typical modern museum has to survive more and more on earned income -- rather than the bigger public subsidies of the past.

“These exhibitions give us something to put on the proverbial billboard,” says Kurt Haunfelner, vice president of exhibits and collections at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. “These days, they clearly are essential. I don’t think anyone who was being frank about the state of America’s public museums could say any differently.”

But the promotion of bigger and bigger blockbusters has come at a heavy cost -- these exhibits can take as much as $20 million to develop. If they tank, they can gulp down millions in losses. In a tight funding climate, museum boards simply don’t want to take the risk. So a good number of U.S. museums are swallowing their pride and making deals with a for-profit enterprise better known for lite rock and the Rolling Stones.

“Our resources are finite,” Cincinnati’s McDonald says. “When a corporation like Clear Channel loses a couple of million dollars, they can just charge it off. But if we drop a couple of million, tomorrow would not be the same as today.”

Clear Channel, of course, expects a fair profit for taking the risk. It doesn’t like to rent its exhibits, like its nonprofit competitors do, and it prefers to take the bulk of the gate money. So when visitors to “Vatican” pony up a dedicated entry fee, expected to be around $17, the vast bulk of that will go not to the Cincinnati Museum Center, but to the coffers of Clear Channel.

Not everyone in the museum business is enamored of Clear Channel. The Field’s Siskel describes many of Clear Channel’s exhibits as “low quality” or “uninteresting,” pointing out that they rarely have contained actual artifacts, but reproductions. She says she would never give away the bulk of the admission money to a touring exhibit.

Low risks

But Siskel increasingly is in the minority. For McDonald, who has forged a reputation of bringing blockbusters to town, “Vatican” is a way of telling his board -- and the public at large -- that his museum is a national leader. He predicts that this show will be the biggest thing to hit Cincinnati since “Titanic.” Best of all, he has been able to tell his directors that the museum won’t have to take any significant risk to bring “Vatican” to town.

McDonald, whose background is finance, is part of a new but numerous breed of museum president -- entrepreneurs with extensive experience in the private sector. They typically see nothing wrong with sharing revenue with for-profit groups known for putting on high-quality exhibitions.

“In this kind of climate,” McDonald says, “boards naturally are reluctant to do anything that might put the financial stability of the institution at risk. And when you partner with someone in a revenue-sharing way, then you both have a stake in the exhibit doing well. If the educational content is sound, what’s wrong with that?”

Clear Channel entered the exhibit business -- as it did many of its other businesses -- by acquiring the leading existing player. In this case, it was a San Antonio firm called BBH Inc. Founded by Stacy F. Harris in 1992, BBH had developed a strong reputation, mainly among smaller science museums, as a reliable provider of content with a mix of solid educational chops and popular appeal.

Harris, who now runs Clear Channel Exhibitions, carved out a clever niche. But to grow, BBH needed capital. And Clear Channel’s Phillips was attracted to “an infrastructure of talented, creative people who had a reputation for excellence in the museum community.”

Harris’ main competitors in the exhibition business long have been either museums or specialists producing exhibits about the one thing they know (such as the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s currently touring “Baseball as America” exhibit). But Harris established relationships with numerous outside content advisors (mainly university faculty) and offered a variety of exhibitions without institutional ties, giving museums one-stop shopping. There was competition in Europe, but there still are no other major for-profit competitors in the U.S.

One early example of Harris’ work was “Out of Africa” (currently on display in Cincinnati), which used a curator from Chicago’s Field Museum and touts the Field’s name in its promotional materials. The exhibition contains virtually no original African artifacts -- it’s mainly video screens, display boards and cardboard cutouts. But the exhibit offers plenty of accurate information and works hard to humanize its theme.

Seated in her office in San Antonio, Harris says she long has tried to harness the close relationship between popular culture and education -- “Jurassic Park,” she says, fostered increased understanding of a specific historical period. She argues that instead of fighting the mass-media influence on education, it’s better to harvest pop culture icons as educational tools. Draw people in with, say, Harry Potter, and you can teach them all kinds of things about anything you wish.

“Museums want properties that will draw a diverse and large audience into their buildings,” Harris says. “They want something with solid educational content that’s loosely related to their missions.”

Some in the industry doubt museums ever will be very profitable for Clear Channel. But with family audiences increasingly favoring interactive entertainment over traditionally passive cultural experiences such as theater or concerts, that may be changing. Clear Channel Exhibitions thinks there would be a huge demand for, say, a blockbuster “Harry Potter” exhibit. Such an show would, for sure, be built around education goals. And the potential bottom line would be difficult to resist.