Eclat, in five easy lessons

FIRST, if you need to feel wanted, consider a career in museum management. Second, be wary of new ventures involving flooded orchestra pits. And third, be jealous of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where life at the moment seems almost impossibly good.

For the movers and shakers of highbrow Southern California -- and indeed for arts leaders nationwide -- these are just some of the larger lessons of 2005, as well as clues, in some cases, to what 2006 may bring. They reflect a landscape of high expectations but diminished realities, where the business of bringing culture to the people requires everaccelerating acumen.

For details on the public trials, quiet desperation and occasional outright triumphs of the Southland’s arts leaders, we take you first to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. More specifically, we take you to a large, empty office on LACMA’s ground floor.

Eight months after director Andrea Rich announced plans to retire from her $406,000-a-year LACMA post, the museum’s trustees are still looking for a replacement.

The LACMA director’s job will be an interesting position, to be sure; Rich’s successor will lead the museum through a major expansion and enjoy swelled membership in the wake of this year’s crowd-pleasing King Tut show. But the new director will also face the delicate task of reckoning with billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, primary sponsor of the LACMA expansion.

In other words, the job is tricky, and finding somebody to fill it may be just as tricky. More than a dozen U.S. art museums, from Miami to Portland, Ore., are beating the bushes for new directors, and LACMA’s executive search committee remains mum, with Chairwoman Nancy Daly Riordan declining to publicly set any hiring-date goal.

Up the hill in Brentwood, meanwhile, the beleaguered Getty Museum -- which had a tougher year than anybody (see sidebar) -- filled its own leadership vacuum in August by hiring Michael Brand away from the much smaller Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. But three high-level museum posts remain to be filled: an antiquities curator, an associate director for collections and an associate director in charge of administration and public affairs.

Lesson 1: Good help is hard to find.

Possession isn’t nine-tenths

SPEAKING of challenges at the Getty, anybody choosing a career in museum management should be warned that if you chase down the wrong old artworks with too much ardor these days, you could find yourself not only wanted but wanted.

In a campaign to regain scores of items it says were looted from its land, the Italian government is not only prosecuting former Getty curator Marion True but pressing several other institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, to hand back treasures. The Greek government has talked about taking similar action.

No matter how the Italian trial works out, many in the art world say the good old days of antiquity acquisition are over for North America’s wealthiest museums, beginning with the Getty. After decades of freely buying up Mediterranean artifacts with murky origins, directors and curators are under pressure to back off unless the objects have clear and above-board histories.

Lesson 2: All legalities aside, if your career is art history and you find yourself not wanting to know where your art has been, you may have lost your way.

Ecstatic about the response

THE Getty wasn’t all administrative gloom this year. Apart from the arrival of a new museum director, there was the summer’s Rembrandt religious portraits exhibition -- more gloom, but of a 17th century oil-on-canvas variety -- which drew 211,313 visitors, the museum’s most popular show of the year.

Elsewhere in museumland, the news has been calmer too. Just look at the Museum of Contemporary Art, ordinarily the edgiest of the city’s big museums: no major management turnover, no collections controversies, a pleasant afterglow from a well-received collaboration with the UCLA Hammer Museum on the current “Masters of American Comics” show.

MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel didn’t even raise a ripple of complaints with his provocative fall “Ecstasy” show, which featured a fountain supposedly laced with LSD. And with the “Visual Music” show, director Jeremy Strick completed a curatorial project he’d been nudging along since before his arrival from the Art Institute of Chicago six years ago.

“Since I came to MOCA, I hadn’t personally curated an exhibition,” says Strick. Now, “I know it can be done -- it’s not easy.”

The museum did suffer one loss: In October, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hired away curator Connie Butler to take over its drawings department, and Strick is still looking for a replacement.

But on the whole, Strick says, “it was a busier, more extensive year than we’ve had recently.” The museum’s Basquiat show, which stayed open until midnight on Saturdays, drew the biggest crowds. (A Robert Rauschenberg show, another Schimmel project, will get the same Saturday-night treatment come summer.)

The weather was at least as calm and sunny at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which followed its freshman year in Walt Disney Concert Hall with a 2004-05 sophomore season that was widely praised and heavily subscribed. Through 167 concerts, 97% of available seats sold. In February, music director Esa-Pekka Salonen signed a contract that will keep him on board at least through 2008.

Though the Phil needs to find a successor to John Mauceri, who will step down as conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra after the 2006 summer season, its summer of 2005 in the Hollywood Bowl set records for most concerts and largest attendance, with more than 1 million tickets sold. Then, in September, the Phil musicians signed a pact that runs through 2009 and puts them among the best-paid orchestras in the nation.

“That was how I spent my late spring and summer, on the orchestra contract,” says the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, Deborah Borda, who calls those talks “innovative and collaborative.”

Keeping prized performers in place was her greatest nuts-and-bolts challenge, Borda says, but the largest, harder-to-measure challenge for the organization is “maintaining the highest musical standards. It’s something that’s on our mind all the time. How do we measure if we’re doing that? ... How do we turn a wonderful relationship into a marriage?”

Prizes may help. In April, composer Stephen Stucky won the 2005 music Pulitzer for a concerto commissioned by the Phil that had its premiere in Disney Hall in March 2004. In a November ceremony, organizers of the St. Louis Grand Center’s Visionary Awards gave Borda their first National Woman in the Arts award. And on Monday, Salonen was named musician of the year at the industry directory Musical America’s 44th annual awards program.

Lesson 3: At arts organizations, perpetual motion is as impossible to achieve as it is in engineering. Somebody’s got to goose things along.

Successfully riding the tide

AT two other mainstays of L.A. cultural life, the Center Theatre Group and the Los Angeles Opera, the year’s highlights list is plenty long, but skies are not quite so clear.

Three months into the regime of newly arrived CTG artistic director Michael Ritchie, there is, in fact, a degree of drama.

The CTG -- the West Coast’s largest nonprofit theatrical organization, with an annual budget of about $40 million -- finished last season about $3 million in the red, its worst financial performance in a decade. Still, that season, as founding artistic director Gordon Davidson bowed out after 38 years, etched memories.

Luis Alfaro had his way with Sophocles for an East L.A. treatment of Greek mythology called “Electricidad.” And Edward Albee’s “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” gave L.A. audiences a chance to learn at last what happens when a man falls in love with a barnyard beast. The season ended bittersweetly with August Wilson’s final play, “Radio Golf,” which had its West Coast premiere in the Mark Taper Forum. The work completed Wilson’s 10-play cycle of African American life in the 20th century and reached the stage just a few weeks before the celebrated playwright died at 60 from cancer.

Then came 2005-06, and in stepped Ritchie, fresh from the top job at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. His first act: a roll of the dice. He OKd a $3.1-million production at the Ahmanson Theatre of playwright Sidney Kingsley’s 1935 “Dead End,” for which the orchestra pit was filled with water to stand in for Manhattan’s East River.

Unfortunately for Ritchie, critics found that first show “boring” (this newspaper) and “trivial” (the LA Weekly) with an ambition that “exceeds its grasp” (Variety). Yet CTG officials say they sold more “Dead End” tickets than they expected to. And about the same time, in the smaller Mark Taper Forum, David Mamet’s farce “Romance” attracted such crowds that an extra week was added to the run.

If you compare ticket sales for the first three CTG shows of this season with those of last year, CTG leaders say, there’s almost no difference, but they decline to give any numbers.

“Until I’ve got a full season behind me, it’ll be hard for me to make a full judgment of the impact of any decisions I’m making,” says Ritchie.

When you’re a newcomer hoping to win over audiences, he says, one part of you hopes that immediately “they’ll start building a statue of you,” but any veteran knows that the real world seldom works that way.

His greatest challenge thus far, Ritchie says, has been “learning L.A. itself, given the particular demands of my job .... I’ve seen this world around me which is terrific, but I’ve not been able to fully participate in it yet.”

At the Los Angeles Opera, nobody should be surprised to hear, there have been notes high and low.

On the low end, the opera fell short of fundraising goals for this season, its 20th, and had to scrub plans to stage a U.S. premiere, Unsuk Chin’s “Alice in Wonderland,” starring Kristin Chenoweth. “We’ll probably have to do it in the 2007-08 season,” artistic director Edgar Baitzel said in announcing the move.

Still, the opera’s seasons have grown longer in recent years. And onstage highlights of the last year included a bold new color-coded staging of “Der Rosenkavalier” in May and June (Act 1 was awash in blue, Act 2 in yellow, Act 3 in red), widely admired performances by rising stars Rolando Villazon and Anna Netrebko in Gounod’s “Romeo and Juliet,” and general director Placido Domingo’s central role in the opera’s first mounting of Wagner’s demanding “Parsifal.”

Singing the lead in that four-hour work would be a brave move for any 64-year-old tenor, not to say one with such a plateful of offstage responsibilities. Assessing the opening night last month, Times music critic Mark Swed said that Domingo, displaying “ageless vocal power and musical command,” came “remarkably close to pulling this ‘Parsifal’ off.” And the production enjoyed a nearly sold-out run of seven performances.

Lesson 4: There’s no substitute for knowing your market.

Creative financing

DOWN south in Costa Mesa, finally, 2005 was the year the Orange County Performing Arts Center entered the home stretch of its $200-million expansion. Despite lagging donations in recent years, construction is 70% complete on a 2,000-seat concert hall (named for donors Renee and Henry Segerstrom) and a 500-seat theater (named for donors Henry and Susan Samueli).

The project, born in 1999 and boosted in 2000 by a $40-million gift from Henry Segerstrom, was designed by architect Cesar Pelli.

It will also include a restaurant, a grand staircase of silver metal and glass, a private donor lounge and a 60-foot-high steel sculpture by Richard Serra, who has described the work as a “torquing oculus.”

The concert hall is to serve as home for the Pacific Symphony, the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, Opera Pacific and the Pacific Chorale.

When it became clear that construction was outpacing fundraising -- donors have pitched in $128.8 million over the years, though just $7.9 million of that in 2005 -- OCPAC leaders arranged bond issues in 2004 to bridge the gap.

With those bonds, OCPAC will in effect borrow $180 million from institutional investors, then use future donations and investment income to pay off the debt and interest over 30 years. Thanks to the arrangement, OCPAC leaders say, they can stand by their target opening date of Sept. 15.

In fact, they’ve booked Placido Domingo to sing a world-premiere William Bolcom song cycle with the Pacific Symphony and Pacific Chorale.

Lesson 5: Torquing oculi are fine, but it’s money in hand that makes the curtain rise.