Curse of the blockbuster?

By Mike Boehm

May 22, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

The mummy of Tutankhamun lies in pieces in its tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings.

It was dismembered, beheaded and cut in half in 1925, when Westerners separated Tut’s resin-stuck corpse from its solid-gold coffin, making a literal hack job of it.

Maybe it’s poetic justice, then, that Tut’s return is exposing growing philosophical clefts in the corpus of the American art museum.

The landmark “Treasures of Tutankhamen” exhibition drew 8 million people during its 1976-79 tour of seven U.S. cities, setting attendance records that still stand -- among them 1,250,000 viewers at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The show transformed archeological artifacts into pop cultural currency and nourished the idea that museums were not just cloisters for the scholarly presentation and quiet contemplation of art. Given the right attraction, they could become buzz factories and cash generators.

Now, the profit-and-loss potential of blockbuster exhibitions is grounds for increasing debate in a museum world straining to reconcile traditional scholarly ideals with new fiscal realities and populist imperatives. Anxieties are spiking with the advent of Tut II, officially “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharoahs.” The show is a profit-making venture financed by AEG (formerly known as Anschutz Entertainment Group), which owns and operates Staples Center and is the world’s second-largest promoter of rock concerts. The show runs June 16 through Nov. 15 at LACMA, the first stop on a 27-month U.S. tour that will proceed to the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Chicago’s Field Museum of natural history; and the Franklin Institute, a science museum in Philadelphia.

King Tut’s return is believed to be the most expensive touring museum exhibition ever brought to the United States -- for its backers and ticket-buyers alike. Among the sights to entice the public: the golden crown Tut wore in death and perhaps in life, a polished-gold dagger that likely was one of his most prized possessions and a gold-plated box etched with scenes from the daily life of the teenage king and his queen, who may have been his half-sister. The show’s final room is devoted to artifacts produced not in Tut’s time, the 1300s BC, but in AD 2005: images from a CT scan done on the mummy in an attempt to establish how Tutankhamun looked, and how he died.

Conformity or cross purposes

Among the questions confronting art-world leaders: Should nonprofit institutions such as LACMA, whose missions are educational, scholarly and aesthetic, hold hands with corporations that see museum galleries as profit centers? Are blockbuster shows worth doing if they dazzle the masses and ring the till, but offer no new insights or discoveries? Can you even really see art in a crowd? And should you have to pay an unprecedented $25 or $30 -- plus handling charges for advance tickets -- to do it?

Or do such qualms look a gift horse in the mouth?

What’s not to like if big corporations such as AEG (part of Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz’s privately held business empire) and Clear Channel Entertainment (the No. 1 rock concert promoter) are willing to carry the freight for nonprofits that seldom have much cash to spare? The Tut deal, according to its organizers and the presenting institutions, allows museums to showcase, with negligible economic risk to themselves, objects that are presumably of keen public interest. To the participants, the partnering of nonprofits with for-profits is not a tawdry dance, as some critics contend, but a legitimate and sensible response to the need to balance elite mission with populist obligation and fiscal reality.

Even apart from corporate-mounted blockbusters, there have been many instances lately of museums engaged in controversial deal making. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, prompted outcries by renting Impressionist masterpieces to the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, a commercial enterprise at the Bellagio hotel-casino in Las Vegas. The Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Brooklyn Museum have been castigated by critics for staging exhibitions considered too lightweight, or for being too eager to cozy up to commercial art lenders who stand to gain from the exposure. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new show on the Chanel design house -- sponsored by Chanel -- was scorned by Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times’ art critic, as “a fawning trifle that resembles a fancy showroom,” an example of how “every year, in one way or another, museums test the public’s faith in their integrity.”

But even if the new Tut tour proves long on glitz and short on intellectual adventure -- a cynic might scoff that it’s the great unearthed luring the great unwashed -- wouldn’t a museum deprive its community and sell short its future by vetoing a show that could create regional or even national buzz, and bring in thousands of newcomers?

New York’s Metropolitan Museum, which organized Tut I, refused “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharoahs” because it didn’t want to drop its policy of charging no more than a “suggested” admission fee of $15 (“suggested” meaning that the broke or shamelessly stingy aren’t turned away if they kick in less).

“We were eager to give our audiences the opportunity to see the latest incarnation of Tut artifacts and treasures, but in the end this museum believes the stronger and more important ethic was the pact we have with our visitors,” says Harold Holzer, a Met spokesman.

The New York Times’ editorial page, which applauded the Met for upholding “a commitment and a cultural function that are vital to protect,” also chided the Tut tour’s venues for hatching an exhibition that “essentially outsources the museum’s real job -- curating content -- to a commercial company.”

Christopher Knight, art critic of the Los Angeles Times, decried Tut’s business setup as “a repulsive profit-sharing agreement forged between LACMA and a corporate entertainment conglomerate,” adding that “no other major American art museum ... was willing to countenance that smarmy scheme.”

LACMA argues that the museum, which charged $2 for Tut in 1978 (the equivalent of about $6 today), is doing a service by providing wondrous sights and lifelong memories for an eager public. The price is reasonable, the museum’s leaders contend, compared to what folks pay for theater, opera, symphony and pop concert tickets, or for professional sports.

“I think the public would have had the right to be critical if we had not brought it here when we had the opportunity,” says Andrea L. Rich, LACMA’s president and director, whose recently announced resignation takes effect in November, when Tut’s five-month run at the museum also will end.

LACMA officials say that, factoring in discounts, which push the tab as low as $6 a head for school groups, the average price for Tut works out to $20. That average equals the previous top ticket charge for a special exhibition at the museum, “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs: Masterpieces From the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam,” in 1999 and last year’s “Renoir to Matisse: The Eye of Duncan Phillips,” lent by the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Regular adult admission costs $9.

Weighing a greater good

IF the for-profit model “is making it feasible for more millions of people to see incredible art, you’d have a hard time convincing me it’s bad,” says Arthur C. Brooks, a professor of public administration at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, who tracks economic trends in the arts and is coauthor of an upcoming Rand Corp. analysis of issues facing the visual arts. “Seventy-five years ago, if you wanted to see King Tut, you had to become a millionaire and take a boat to Egypt. Now, for 20 bucks, which practically anybody who’s interested can afford, you can go and see it. And somebody is complaining about this phenomenon?”

The fuse for this debate was lighted in 2003, when the Egyptian government decided to restore Tut’s passport. In 1981, a figure of the goddess Selket from Tutankhamun’s tomb was damaged while on tour in West Germany, according to Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. Tut’s relics were grounded indefinitely, displayed only at home.

Things changed when the Antiquities Museum in Basel, Switzerland, sought a major exhibition for its recently expanded Egyptian wing. Andre Wiese, head of the Basel museum’s Egyptian department, cites one historic reason why Egyptian authorities were willing to at least listen to a request for Tut artifacts: In 1997, 58 tourists, more than half of them Swiss, were massacred in a terrorist attack on a temple site at Luxor. A wish to underscore confidence and comity between the two nations helped establish the negotiations, Wiese says, but that only went so far. In the end, it was money that brought Tut forth from Egypt.

Hawass, a mediagenic figure who earned his doctorate in Egyptology from the University of Pennsylvania, is a former visiting professor in UCLA’s department of Near Eastern languages and cultures. He became antiquities secretary in 2002 and was determined to leverage Egypt’s touring artifacts on behalf of the vast, but often ill-housed, troves at home.

Plans are in place to build new museums, including a huge one near the pyramids in Giza, to take the pressure off outdated halls, such as the 103-year-old Egyptian Museum in Cairo, current repository of the thousands of artifacts from King Tut’s tomb. Tut’s hoard, Hawass reasons, is the best portable earner his nation has -- and he insists that it command top dollar.

Starting in April 2004, Tut played to 620,000 people in Basel and 870,000 at the Art and Exhibition Hall in Bonn, Germany. Egypt’s earnings came to about 6 million euros ($7.7 million) in each city, according to Hawass.

Egyptian curators picked the 120 works that make up the show. Fifty are from Tut’s tomb, of which 13 also were seen during the late-1970s U.S. tour. Accompanying Tut’s treasures are 70 pieces from the tombs of several of his far more powerful and historically significant precursors in the 18th Dynasty. But missing is the iconic, solid-gold burial mask of Tutankhamun, which was saved for last in the “Treasures of Tutankhamen” and became the chief emblem of 1970s Tutmania. It has since been deemed too important to leave Egypt, Hawass says. Another change since the 1970s tour involves the spelling of the boy king’s name: There are no vowels in ancient hieroglyphic writing, and scholarly consensus on rendering Tut’s final syllables has shifted from “amen” to “amun.”

An eye on the bottom line

For the American tour, Egypt set $5 million per city as its nonnegotiable, upfront price -- a talent fee of sorts. It chose the National Geographic Society, long known for exploring, researching and popularizing Egyptian antiquities, as a creative partner.

Logistics were assigned to Ohio-based Arts and Exhibitions International. The for-profit company is headed by John Norman, a former rock concert promoter. For his former employer, Clear Channel Communications, he organized touring shows of artifacts from the Titanic that drew hundreds of thousands of people, beginning in 1999.

Before leaving to start AEI two years ago, Norman says, he helped plan “Saint Peter and the Vatican: the Legacy of the Popes,” Clear Channel’s first blockbuster-scale leap into the art exhibition world. With that show, Clear Channel established a business model now being followed by Tut: The deals specify that before the spigot can be turned on for the profit-making partners, the nonprofit museum’s overhead costs are covered. The Metropolitan Museum may have refused, but others vied for Tut, Norman says, and the four slots allotted by the Egyptians were easy to fill.

Needing a financial partner with the heft to pay $20 million to Egypt and front additional millions to mount the Tut tour -- including about $1 million per city for insurance alone -- Norman called on John Meglen, a contact from his rock ‘n’ roll days who runs AEG’s live entertainment division. AEG President Tim Leiweke and his company, accustomed to presenting the likes of Paul McCartney, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, negotiated with Cairo for the rights to King Tut. AEG met the Egyptians’ price, added a $2 million donation for renovating a children’s museum in Cairo, and the deal was done. As an added goodwill gesture, AEG arranged for Lionel Richie to entertain during a peace conference last fall in Geneva, co-hosted by Egypt’s first lady, Suzanne Mubarak.

AEG is anteing up “tens of millions of dollars” for the tour, says Leiweke, who wouldn’t give a precise figure. “If we do our job well, we’ll have redefined how to do these big tours going forward. The [for-profit] sector comes in and takes the risk.” Attendance of 1 million per city would be “a good goal,” he says, as AEG tries to draw enough museum-goers to reap a profit after covering Egypt’s upfront fees and other overhead costs and sharing ticket and merchandising revenues with Egypt and the host museums.

Part of AEG’s job, Leiweke emphasizes, is to avoid coming off like a corporate bull in the museum world’s china shop. “We want to make sure we don’t over-commercialize what we’re doing.” That, he says, means being “staid and diplomatic” in observing the protocols of museum presentation.

“It’s a learning experience for us,” Leiweke says. “New York is still a bit of a puzzle. We can’t understand how you deprive the largest city in the country of the largest exhibition in our lifetime. There’s a long way to go before this philosophy of business is endorsed by leading art museums in the largest cities.”

Besides the millions Egypt receives up front, Hawass says, the deal calls for his government to share retailing revenues and reap an additional $1 million for every 100,000 in attendance beyond the 700,000 mark. He thinks Tut can earn $9 million per city in the United States; after it collects American museum-goers’ millions, Tut will move on, if all goes as planned, to London or Paris and then to Japan, with AEG continuing to produce the tour.

Meanwhile, Tut has company in the blockbusters-for-profit business.

Clear Channel’s Vatican show, presumably bolstered by the emotion and pomp of the recent papal succession, will return in June for engagements in Montreal, Milwaukee and San Antonio, after a well-attended four-city run in 2003-2004 that ended at the San Diego Museum of Art.

Another profit-seeking contender on the museum blockbuster circuit, “The Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egypt” -- 115 objects supplied by the Egyptian antiquities council and designed and circulated by United Exhibits Group of Copenhagen -- is currently at the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in Las Vegas. That show, which focuses on customs and beliefs concerning the afterlife described in the ancient “Book of the Dead,” is on a 13-city, 5 1/2 -year American tour that began in 2002 at the prestigious National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Partnering with a for-profit was a first for the federally funded National Gallery, says its chief of exhibitions, D. Dodge Thompson. One of the museum’s biggest concerns, he says, was ensuring that it had some sway over what would be shown, and control over how it would be presented. Thompson says the National Gallery was able to negotiate “significant changes” in the list of objects proposed by United Exhibits Group and the Egyptian antiquities authorities, securing preferred substitutions for more than half of the items originally listed. “We wanted to make sure we got the very best works that were on-task in telling this particular story.” He says the National Gallery also received carte blanche to independently research and produce its own exhibition catalog.

LACMA too asked for changes in the Tut exhibition that had debuted in Europe, says Nancy Thomas, the curator of Egyptian art who is the museum’s deputy director of art administration and collections. “We wanted to make it the most stirring selection of objects possible.” But no switches were allowed. What’s coming to LACMA, Thomas says, is nevertheless “quite a wonderful selection, and it tells the story of the development of funerary practices within the 18th Dynasty in a way the original Tut tour could not.” LACMA officials say the museum got to vet the exhibition’s layout, labels, audio guide and wall texts, but had no involvement with a $35 book written by Hawass and published by National Geographic.

Partners with more exposure

The business model for “Quest” differs drastically from Tut, with considerably more risk to the museums. Apart from the National Gallery, which exhibitions chief Thompson says paid no fee because of its free admission policy, Egypt is collecting $1 million from each museum on the tour, and the Tut venues must shell out for other costs that they are virtually assured of recouping.

The total outlay for “Quest” was about $3 million each at the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, officials there say. The Denver museum met its targets, according to a spokeswoman, but New Orleans would have fallen short if not for a $1-million tourism grant from the city government, says E. John Bullard, the museum’s director. Top ticket prices to date on the “Quest” tour have been $16 to $20.

United Exhibitions recently confirmed a partnership with Iraq’s National Museum to organize “The Gold of Nimrud,” an exhibition of 2,700-year-old jewelry, and send it on a five-year tour of Europe, North America and Asia starting in the fall.

Before LACMA officials knew that Tut was coming to the United States, they already had turned down “Quest” as too risky, Rich says. “They kept after us for years. The deal was just not good.”

Tut, in contrast, poses no fiscal downside, Rich says, although the risk-free arrangement means no great windfall, either. For “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs,” LACMA wagered the upfront fees paid to the Dutch museum. When the paintings drew 821,000 visitors (surpassed only by Tut I), LACMA netted $7.8 million, according to LACMA figures. With Tut, Rich says, “the way the deal is structured, we’re not going to make a great deal of money.” Experts say the main strategic reason for doing blockbuster shows is to generate attention and foot traffic, with the possible longer-term benefit of minting more regular museum-goers and attracting new donors. “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs” helped to more than double annual attendance to 1.3 million. Membership rolls -- patrons who pay higher fees as a donation or to secure perks such as free admission and museum store discounts -- swelled from 64,000 to 104,000. But those gains have since subsided; LACMA attendance, post-Van Gogh, has zigzagged. It reached 799,000 last year, and memberships stood at 75,000.

Conventional wisdom says that blockbusters are risky, and that addiction to big touring shows can damage a museum’s fiscal health, wear out its staff and stifle creative daring.

“That’s why you wouldn’t want to have blockbusters year after year,” Rich says. “But doing them every three or four years is something we should be doing. We’re set up for it. We have the staff.”

Maxwell L. Anderson, the former Whitney Museum of American Art director who is now a principal in the arts-management advisory firm AEA Consulting, sees the temptation to overindulge on blockbusters as a symptom of a deeper, systemic confusion besetting art museums. In casting about for ways to show their institutions’ value and relevance, he says, directors and board members tend to focus on easily quantifiable, readily understood measures. Attendance, memberships, growing the budget while keeping it balanced -- these get the most attention, Anderson says, when the truest indicators of a museum’s worth are much more subtle. Among them, he says, are high-quality curatorial research, effective art conservation and finding smart and imaginative ways to display pieces from permanent collections.

Yet Anderson doesn’t decry the Tut-for-profit phenomenon: “Being holier-than-thou doesn’t serve anyone.” If a museum is open about the nature and terms of its dealings with for-profit organizers, and stringent in holding them to established standards, he thinks the new model of the corporate blockbuster could find a legitimate place. Still, Anderson worries that museum leaders are in danger of losing their compass as they face dwindling government support and reluctance on the part of private funders to underwrite the “necessary but unsexy” work of research and maintaining collections.

“Museums are coerced, in a way, into ventures that would have been seen as impossible 10 years ago,” Anderson says. “This is a great country because we are adventurous and capitalist and take chances. The downside is there is no agreed-upon way to measure success. Too often it defaults to consumer patterns and market research patterns, rather than traditional core mission.”

Missing in the bargain

Certainly, the point of “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharoahs” is not to be subtle and unsexy. Thomas, the LACMA deputy director, says the show offers fresh angles for a general audience, especially concerning how tomb art developed over several reigns. But no, she acknowledges, scholarship is not the focus: “The goal is exposing a whole new generation to this material.”

Selma Holo, who directs the USC Fisher Gallery and heads the university’s museum studies program, worries that if corporate blockbusters proliferate, they could make oldline museum values seem quaint.

“One has to wonder if the public is being brought to just an ever-lower common denominator rather than [getting] a great show organized by curators,” she says. The most talked-about art exhibitions could “become more and more like spectacular entertainment, and I just worry that people are going to begin to expect that this is what museums are about.”

As she digs into the subject, it’s hard to tell where Holo’s analysis ends and lamentation begins:

“People begin to think they can look at art quickly as they are shuffled through in crowds. You’ve got to spend time. Maybe a museum is the last place in society where we can slow down a bit. But maybe people just want to be entertained.”

The sundered, 3,300-year-old corpse of Tutankhamun lies in its sarcophagus, sleeping amid the sands west of ancient Thebes. He is bereft of the riches required in the afterlife because they were spirited off and put on display. Given the anxieties afflicting American art museums, planted during Tut’s previous visit and intensifying with his return, one wonders whether there really could be a mummy’s curse.

“Violate my house of treasures,” it might read, “and you will not know peace in yours.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Top 10 LACMA draws

The ‘Treasures of Tutankhamen’ tour set the stage for art exhibitions as profitable blockbusters.

Rank: 1

Exhibition: Treasures of Tutankhamen

Year: 1978

Attendance: 1,250,629

Rank: 2

Exhibition: Van Gogh’s Van Goghs: Masterpieces From the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Year: 1999

Attendance: 821,000