Cultural tourism effort falters

L.A.’s arts scene has given the outside world plenty to attend to this year, with King Tut’s return, architect Thom Mayne’s Pritzker Prize and, for better or worse, the J. Paul Getty Trust’s troubles. More big doings lie ahead early in 2006. But at this seemingly propitious moment for trumpeting Los Angeles’ arrival as a player in high culture as well as pop culture, the city apparently can’t afford a megaphone.

To make noise on behalf of cultural L.A., Eli Broad, the billionaire businessman and arts patron, has tried over the past year to launch a nonprofit agency, Arts + Culture L.A., geared to lure culture-seeking tourists and their dollars. He thought that an $8-million marketing campaign would be unfolding by now. Instead, Arts + Culture L.A. has been thwarted repeatedly in bids for government funding and exists only on paper.

“It’s unfortunate not to go forward,” Broad lamented recently, pointing to rare, high-profile opportunities that are about to be missed: the January reopening of the renovated Getty Villa and a major retrospective of L.A. artists at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, opening in March.

He thinks Arts + Culture L.A. should be funded with public dollars rather than out of his own deep pockets -- the source, among other largesse, of $10 million for the Walt Disney Concert Hall and $60 million for a new contemporary art gallery at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. With cultural tourism, Broad says, the entire L.A. economy benefits, so the public should pay.

He tried to coax grants from every level of government -- city, county, state and federal. But over the past six months, the hoped-for harvests of public money have died on the vine. Bad news came from Sacramento last summer and from Washington this month. Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) carried a $2.5-million request for Arts + Culture L.A. into budget negotiations, but the proposal fell victim to California’s chronic revenue shortfalls.

Nunez spokesman Steven Maviglio said “dismal” budgetary conditions made it impossible to push expenditures earmarked for home districts. “It had nothing to do with the merit of the proposal,” he said.

The federal request was made by Republican Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon of Santa Clarita, but spokesmen for McKeon and Rep. Jerry Lewis, the San Bernardino County Republican who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, said the need to fund operations in Iraq and hurricane relief squeezed it out of the running.

At home, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors rejected a $2-million request from Arts + Culture L.A. when Supervisor Don Knabe’s June 20 motion to fund it failed for lack of a second. Zev Yaroslavsky, a leading pro-arts voice on the board, opposed paying for Broad’s initiative; he says that government spending for the arts should bring tangible results -- funding buildings, programs and operating expenses rather than an ad campaign whose payoff is speculative.

The Los Angeles City Council was the only government body willing to bet $2 million on Arts + Culture L.A. The city government, whose arts spending is dwarfed by the county’s, had one obvious added incentive: Last year, it collected $128 million from its 14% levy on hotel bills, and any increase in tourism would bring a substantial return to municipal coffers. Few hotels are on unincorporated county land, so the county’s 12% room tax generates just $10 million a year.

But now, even the money OKd by the City Council has fallen off the table. The deal called for Arts + Culture L.A. to come up with matching funds before the city would allocate its share, and nothing materialized. Consequently, there’s nothing in the till to promote cultural high points from the recent past (the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Hall, Thom Mayne’s Pritzker, nearly 938,000 visitors for the first American showing in a generation of King Tut’s treasures) or the ones about to occur.

The Getty’s controversies, over management ethics and accusations of illegal acquisition of antiquities, could heighten national and foreign coverage of the Getty Villa’s reopening as a showcase for ancient Greek, Roman and Etruscan artifacts; attention to those troubles already has made more folks aware that the world’s richest art institution resides in L.A.

On a more celebratory note, the Centre Pompidou is scheduled on March 7 to open two major exhibitions focusing on L.A. One, “Los Angeles -- Paris: 1955-1985,” showcases works by more than 80 L.A. artists, including Sam Francis, Ed Ruscha and David Hockney. The other is architect Mayne’s first museum show since winning the Pritzker.

“We’re about to miss some wonderful promotional opportunities,” said Laura Zucker, who took a six-month semi-sabbatical this year as executive director of the Los Angeles County Arts Commission to work as a consultant in the Broad Foundation’s effort to get Arts + Culture L.A. off the ground. When funding prospects seemed good, Zucker said, there was talk of reserving an area at the Pompidou where museum-goers could see videos about L.A.’s arts and cultural attractions and have their questions answered by French-speaking staff. “It’s too late, unfortunately,” to exploit the “Los Angeles-Paris” connection, Zucker said.

Cultural tourism became a high-profile issue in L.A. in 2004 after a backlash over then-Mayor James K. Hahn’s short-lived bid to dismantle the city’s Cultural Affairs Department. Hahn recovered by appointing a blue ribbon commission to study municipal arts policy -- with specific instructions to consider how to parlay L.A.’s cultural attractions into magnets for tourism. At that point, Broad began talking publicly of ways to promote the arts nationally and abroad, in an L.A. equivalent of the famed “I Love New York” campaign inaugurated to boost tourism during the Big Apple’s late 1970s economic crisis.

Arts + Culture L.A. was conceived to augment the efforts of L.A. Inc., the nonprofit tourism bureau that promotes arts attractions to a degree but has other priorities.

Before seeking government grants, the Broad Foundation commissioned the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. to study potential gains from promoting cultural tourism. Although the resulting report acknowledged it would be difficult to predict how much bang L.A. could expect from its advertising buck, researchers ventured projections based on out-of-county marketing efforts in three previous campaigns: for blockbuster exhibitions of paintings by Vincent Van Gogh (LACMA, 1999) and Andy Warhol (the Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002) and for “California: Culture’s Edge,” a $1.65-million cultural tourism advertising initiative that was aimed at American Express cardholders in 1998.

Extrapolating from those examples, the study concluded that an $8-million marketing campaign could double the annual number of out-of-towners visiting L.A. cultural attractions, from 2.6 million to 5.2 million. Los Angeles would remain far behind New York, London and Paris, which attract 10 million to 15.6 million cultural tourists, according to the study. But the effort could bring an additional $535 million a year in visitor spending and yield $54 million more in sales and hotel taxes -- a fabulous return, if the projections are accurate.

Although Arts + Culture L.A. is experiencing a difficult birth, those who see rewards in selling the city’s arts attractions to tourists say they will keep pushing.

“Sometimes new ideas take longer to take root,” said Michael McDowell, director of cultural tourism for L.A. Inc. Although Broad’s initiative stalled this year, McDowell said it “certainly got a conversation going, and you’ve got the attention of elected officials.”

Speaking outside the entrance to the Tut exhibition early this month, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa lauded the attempted cultural tourism push and challenged other levels of government to get involved. “I want to use my bully pulpit ... to say the state and county need to be a part of this.”

Robin Kramer, now chief of staff to Villaraigosa, was in her previous job as a Broad Foundation executive when she came up with an idea that Broad says would put Arts + Culture L.A. immediately in business: adding a $1 cultural tourism tax to each hotel bill.

But speaking with her new government hat on, Kramer was cautious about any increase. “It’s something to be looked at,” she said, but “may not be a smart competitive idea over time.”

The initial failure of Arts + Culture L.A. doesn’t mean that Los Angeles has missed the boat on cultural tourism, Kramer said. “There will be a continuing wave of cultural activity and arts pizazz. The Arts + Culture L.A. effort will happen,” she predicted -- pointing to the Grand Avenue Project as a coming landmark that could be promoted as a cultural tourism magnet. Keenly backed by Broad, who chairs a committee trying to implement it, the $1.8-billion proposal aims to create a critical mass for downtown L.A.’s revival by developing a new park, condos and shopping near existing cultural attractions on Bunker Hill.

Broad aims to continue seeking corporate and government funding to establish Arts + Culture L.A. as a key image-weaver in L.A.’s perceptual makeover from solely a pop culture town to one also steeped in the arts. “It hasn’t died by any means,” he said. “I hope something will happen in 2006.”