Art Exhibitions Inc.

Midway through the sprawling exhibition “Saint Peter and the Vatican: The Legacy of the Popes,” a partial reconstruction has been erected to show the kind of scaffolding Michelangelo employed to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, circa 1510. As everyone knows, the paint job was a Herculean task.

In the show, two sides of the dimly lighted chamber are lined with rough-hewn timbers, while a narrow vault rises overhead. A reproduction of some of the ceiling’s monumental figures is in place, while trowels and wooden buckets encrusted with dried plaster stand at the ready. The mock-up looks like a fragment of the movie set for the 1965 potboiler “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” minus Charlton Heston (sweet relief). And you get to walk through it, the way you do sets on the Universal Studios tour.

Michelangelo’s ceiling celebrates the Creation; this display celebrates the Re-creation. The producers of the exhibition, at the San Diego Museum of Art, know something that the Vatican has known for centuries: Showbiz is a powerful draw.

At last month’s Cannes Film Festival, the savvy Spanish director Pedro Almodovar put it in simple terms. He told the press that he doesn’t believe in God, but he most certainly believes in church ritual. And just as Almodovar might happily drop by St. Catherine’s to catch the “Sunday matinee,” even though he doesn’t practice Catholicism, so a public uninterested in art might line up at an art museum, if the theatrical display is compelling enough.

With gold and diamonds by the pound, the Vatican show is. And the crowds are coming. The show broke attendance records in Cincinnati. San Diego expects to sell a quarter-million tickets, from a high of $18 (for the public) to a low of $6 (for members’ children). That adds up to likely revenue in the low millions. Not bad for a show almost entirely devoid of significant art but awash in decorative paraphernalia, historical artifacts, souvenirs, models, newsreels, reproductions and reconstructions.

Welcome to the jolly world of Clear Channel Exhibitions, an arm of the global media and entertainment colossus Clear Channel Communications Inc. based in San Antonio. This show represents the leading edge of a brave new world -- the corporation as curator.

Clear Channel is best known for its dominant positions in the billboard, live pop-concert and radio markets. Last February it raised a ruckus by terminating raucous morning personality Howard Stern from its six radio stations that carried the show, including one of 13 stations it controls in San Diego. (Stern has said he got the ax after urging listeners to vote against President Bush in November; the Texas company, whose executives are large contributors to the Bush campaign, has said indecent programming was the cause.) In 2001 the mass media conglomerate entered the exhibition field, to design and lease “family-oriented learning experiences.”

Usually when you go to an art museum, you see exhibitions organized by art museum curators or freelance professionals in the field. The Vatican show’s American curator is a pop science writer, the author of a sympathetic book on the metaphoric illness known as multiple chemical sensitivity, or MCS. (That’s the pseudo-disease that was at the center of “Safe,” Todd Haynes’ mesmerizing 1995 breakout movie with Julianne Moore.) The book did well, although most experts don’t believe the medical condition exists.

A former buyer for Neiman Marcus department stores runs the new business. Artists and art professionals are among those hired to assemble shows, which are available to history museums, science centers, art museums and other venues. But Clear Channel is not a public tax-exempt art agency; it’s a private, for-profit corporation, working to establish a business in “blockbuster” exhibits.

An art museum’s public service mission is different from mass media’s business agenda. To succeed, mass culture spectacles must appeal to the lowest common denominator. (That’s one reason the Vatican show mostly shuns high art.) The company began by circulating entertainments built for history and science museums -- Titanic artifacts, dinosaurs, outer space, etc. A foray into art museums was the next logical step.

How can that be, you ask, if art museums always seem to be struggling to make ends meet? Well, don’t forget -- Clear Channel is not an art museum but a commercial content provider. It’s under no obligation, moral or otherwise, to keep art in the foreground.

The Vatican show’s 350-plus objects take up almost the entire ground floor of the museum. If you’re interested in saints Peter and Paul and Roman Catholic history, there’s quite a bit to learn here. Guided by acres of didactic panels, the 11 sections explain the discovery of Peter’s tomb, how the Roman Catholic liturgy works, the demolished basilica that originally occupied the Vatican hill, current church missionary activities abroad and more.

If you’re interested in art, though, there isn’t much to see. The papacy has been an exceptional art collector, on and off (though mostly “off” for the last couple of hundred years). But the good stuff has pretty much been left behind in Rome. The show even mostly avoids the ways in which pontiffs used art to great effect -- to propagate the faith, out-dazzle rivals and establish dogma.

Easily the best thing here is a small, Baroque terra cotta figurine by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, just 15 inches high. The wind-swept corkscrew composition shows Charity, symbol of Christian love, as a luxurious woman suckling a fat baby boy at her exposed breast. Two more kiss at her feet, beneath a sheltering garment, while a fourth boy cries for attention at her side.

The work is breathlessly said to include the artist’s thumbprint in the clay. How scholars know it’s Gian Lorenzo’s thumbprint and not a clumsy studio assistant’s is not explained. Still, as a dramatic image of the overwhelming demands of human mercy, the small study is hard to beat.

It was fun to see the glamorous (if artistically bland) reliquaries bearing a piece of Pope Gregory’s skull and Pius V’s bony finger, still wearing his papal ring. I could have done without the innocuous red silk skullcap worn in 1978 by Karol Wojtyla -- then a cardinal, now the pope. (It is red and round, like most every other cardinal’s skullcap.) But here as on the Sistine stage set, I kept wondering what these things were doing in an art museum.

The Clear Channel business plan seems built on three main considerations: First, focus on celebrity -- star material with general audience appeal, far beyond the limited realm of art aficionados. Then, if possible line up fellow corporations to help sponsor the exhibition, defraying costs. Finally, use the vast reach of Clear Channel’s media holdings to cross-promote the celebrity event and commercial sponsors. Or, as the Clear Channel website neatly puts it: “Corporations can reach large, qualified, captive audiences who appreciate their corporate support, while extending their own marketing through exhibit advertising and public relations which often deliver media values exceeding 15-20 times the sponsor’s investment.”

Question: Why should a publicly funded, tax-subsidized art museum help underwrite the potentially lucrative business activity of private corporations -- especially when art is the least of the show’s concerns? That question is not addressed on the website. But profit-sharing isn’t much of an answer. Periodically American corporations do overwhelm our public institutions; they did during the Gilded Age and again in the Roaring ‘20s, and they have since the go-go 1980s. The current privatization of the public world, which began as part of the so-called Reagan Revolution, is today a booming fact of daily life.

Education, not art

The Vatican show is one of two initial art museum offerings from Clear Channel -- and San Diego is coincidentally hosting both at once. The other is a two-part show called “Chicano Now: American Expressions” and “Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge,” on view at the downtown and La Jolla branches of the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art. It’s only a tad better.

The published target audience for “Chicano Now: American Expressions” is 8-year-olds and up. (No kids were at the museum when I saw it -- just the young at heart.) If you think there isn’t much significant art in the Vatican show, the dearth here will stun you.

Purely an educational display, partly designed by artists, it uses super-graphics, charts, wall texts, games, film clips, music videos and celebrities -- George Lopez, Paul Rodriguez, Culture Clash, etc. -- to “explain” Chicano family life, work habits, religious beliefs, politics and culture. The celebs are smart and funny, just like on TV (you don’t become a star completely by chance).

The best object is a flashy video-display station, whose design crosses a Mexican sombrero with a flying saucer. Get it? Culture Clash is lampooning the idea of Chicanos as aliens. But do we really need to go on down to the art museum for this? Or to ogle a simulated lowrider, when real ones cruise by on the street? “Chicano Now” is pop anthropology -- art as edu-tainment.

More satisfying because it features actual art worth looking at is “Chicano Visions,” a display of more than 80 works by such established luminaries as Frank Romero, Carlos Almaraz, Carmen Lomas Garza, Rupert Garcia and Gronk. The most powerful selections are the two big paintings and three large pastels by L.A. artist John Valadez, an exceptional draftsman for whom daily life, acutely observed, launches inexplicable mysteries. These paintings compel precisely because their mysteries are not “explained,” unlike the lesson-plan condescension at the other display.

But as a painting survey “Chicano Visions” also suffers mightily, because it’s almost wholly drawn from one private collection. The enthusiasm of that collector -- comedian and actor Cheech Marin, who provides Clear Channel’s requisite celebrity glow -- is infectious. But a collector’s private considerations inevitably conflict with the requirements of independent scholarship, for which we rely on art museums.

The show includes several terrific works made since the 1980s, and the catalog also has some interesting essays. But as a history of Chicano painting, which stretches to the dawn of the 1970s, this show is severely limited. “American Artists on the Verge” -- we’re never told on the verge of what -- feels more promotional than analytical, historical or critical.

These Clear Channel entertainments, however mediocre, were obviously booked in San Diego for demographic reasons. The city was once described, not unjustly, as a drowsy suburb of vibrant and burgeoning Tijuana, and Catholic and Chicano border populations are large. But the art museum public, existing and potential, has been handed the short end of the stick. It’s one thing for Clear Channel Communications Inc. to champion celebrity over art; if art museums play along, the game will just about be over.

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‘Saint Peter and the Vatican: The Legacy of the Popes’

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays

Where: San Diego Museum of Art

Ends: Sept. 6

Price: $6 to $18

Contact: (619) 232-7931

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‘Chicano Now:

American Expressions’

and ‘Chicano Visions:

American Painters on the Verge’

When: Through Sept. 12

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla and downtown San Diego

Price: $2 to $6

Contact: (858) 454-3541