2007, all wrapped up

If 2007 was any indication, one thing’s clear about 2008: Arts journalists will go slowly insane trying to coin new words for the effect that 26-year-old Gustavo Dudamel, whiz kid from Venezuela, will have on the classical music scene. Dudamelization? Dudaramification? Dudamorphosis? By the time Dudamel, successor to Los Angeles Philharmonic Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, takes the baton in 2009, expect a global Dudameltdown. More later on the man who music-minded bloggers have simply dubbed “The Dude” or “El Dude.” His appointment is just one of many major developments in the arts in 2007 in greater Los Angeles and beyond. Here are some recaps and updates on some of the big stories of 2007:

Culture’s new czar

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa named Olga Garay, formerly a New York producer and arts consultant, to head the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs. In 2008, Garay will oversee the development of the city’s first “cultural master plan” since 1991. Then, the controversial plan masterminded by former culture chief Adolfo V. Nodal demanded the equitable distribution of arts funds among L.A.’s diverse ethnic groups. Now, the heady goal is to position L.A. as an international arts center.

Getty antiquities

In August, the J. Paul Getty Trust agreed to return 40 long-contested ancient artworks to Italy, ending a cultural and legal battle that had plagued the institution for decades. Among the important works leaving Malibu’s Getty Villa: the Getty’s signature statue of Aphrodite. While the bulk of these objects were taken off display in the fall, visitors to Malibu’s Getty Villa will be able to see the Aphrodite until December 2010.

A collection grows

While the Getty suffers depletion of its ancient art treasures, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has seen the transformation of its holdings of modern art with a major gift from L.A. art collectors Janice and Henri Lazarof, who have given the institution 130 works by major artists, including 20 works by Pablo Picasso, seven sculptures and a painting by Alberto Giacometti and two versions of Constantin Brancusi’s signature bronze, “Bird in Space.” While the museum would not disclose the value of the artworks, sales of similar pieces suggest the collection is worth more than $100 million.

Bowers’ ticket high

The cost of culture went up in Santa Ana when the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art raised its general admission price to $17 on weekdays and $19 on weekends, the highest general admission fee on the West Coast and just behind New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (both $20).

Adam and Eve

The Norton Simon held on to two of the jewels of its collection, at least for now, when a Los Angeles federal judge dismissed a case that jeopardized its ownership of a pair of paintings of Adam and Eve, nearly 500 years old, by German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder. The action halted dueling lawsuits filed by the museum and Marei von Saher of Connecticut, the heir of a Jewish art dealer who lost the artworks to the Nazis in World War II. But the battle isn’t over. Von Saher has filed an appeal, likely to be heard in the coming year.

Murakami boutique

If you wanted to spend even more than that Bowers ticket cost, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles offered a fully operational Louis Vuitton boutique as part of a retrospective of the work of Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. While art world purists may have been offended, audiences embraced the show and the high-end leather goods featuring Murakami designs, setting attendance records at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary space and dropping a bundle on handbags that cost upward of $900.

‘America Tropical’

After decades of false starts, 17 months ago Mayor Villaraigosa and the J. Paul Getty Trust announced they had made a $7.8-million deal to finally bring to fruition the restoration to public view of the famous 1932 mural by Mexican master David Alfaro Siqueiros, painted on an Olvera Street building. The announced deadline -- 18 months -- means January 2008, at which time we’ll know whether or not the project will be another success or another failure for the city, the mayor and the philanthropy.

Monetizing holdings

Selling works of art long in the public sphere to raise funds (often for purposes other than art) grew to near-epidemic proportions as the art market continued to boom. Thomas Jefferson University, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Maier Museum of Art, Fisk University, the Rose Art Museum -- these and others became embroiled in controversies, and sometimes lawsuits -- over plans to sell off masterpieces.

China emerging

Symbolized by the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, a museum that opened in Beijing last month, the role of China and contemporary Chinese art in the globalizing art scene moved into high gear. The Beijing Olympics will further focus attention on the question of whether or not art produced in a country that does not allow free speech can find a place in the forefront of cultural discourse.

Striking at Broadway

The stagehands strike in New York threw a monkey wrench into Broadway’s fall season, darkening all but nine shows and leaving a slew of highly anticipated dramas, including Aaron Sorkin’s “The Farnsworth Invention,” Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County” and Conor McPherson’s “The Seafarer,” in a state of fretful limbo.

The strike ended in late November, and “August: Osage County” and “The Seafarer” opened to stellar reviews in the New York Times and “Farnsworth” enjoyed box office success. But the strike raises troubling questions as to how Broadway will recover from box-office losses estimated at $20 million.

Cirque at the Kodak

In an acrobatic move to remain competitive with downtown’s Nokia Theatre and other performing arts venues -- as well as fill its often-empty stage between Academy Awards shows -- Hollywood’s troubled Kodak Theatre announced a 10-year, $100-million agreement with Cirque du Soleil to create a permanent show for the theater, based on Hollywood history, to open in 2010.

World stage

Downtown’s Los Angeles Theatre Center, now known as the New LATC under operating entity the Latino Theater Company, reopened in October with its first World Stage Festival. While that event featured local productions plus participation from Spain and Mexico, the theater has ambitious plans to solicit works from “every inhabited continent” for 2008.

Diavolo experiments

L.A.’s Diavolo Dance Theater not only wowed the critics at the Hollywood Bowl in September as its athletic dancers interacted with a huge metallic cube in performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic to the Salonen composition “Foreign Bodies,” the company also introduced a new center for contemporary dance, the Diavolo Lab Space in the Brewery Art Colony, offering the potential for some of the city’s other contemporary companies to push the envelope.

Youth appeal

Gustavo Dudamel was not the only young conductor to make headlines in 2007: The New York Philharmonic responded by appointing its own young -- well, youngish -- conductor, 40-year-old Alan Gilbert, to take over in 2009. But Dudamel then dominated the news by making audiences scream and shout when he brought his Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra to Disney Hall in the fall and then took it to New York, where he also made his acclaimed debut with the New York Philharmonic. The Simon Bolivar, a product of the youth orchestra program in Venezuela called El Sistema, put a spotlight on music education wherever the band played. Edinburgh was inspired to begin its own El Sistema, Scottish style. And the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with the backing of the mayor, has plans to make a similar program happen here.

New school

In November, the Herb Alpert Foundation, created by former Tijuana Brass trumpet player-vocalist and A&M; Records co-founder Herb Alpert and his wife, singer Lani Hall, pledged $30 million to establish the cross-disciplinary UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. It is the largest single gift to music education in the Western United States, according to UCLA. The endowment will bring the university’s departments of ethnomusicology, music and musicology under a single umbrella for the study and performance of world, popular and classical music, jazz and other genres.

Colburn moves in

In August, the Colburn School moved into its new $120-million, 13-story structure adjacent to its Grand Avenue headquarters. The move was heralded as a major step forward in the school’s becoming the Juilliard of the West. But some parents of the 1,500-plus kids attending the Colburn’s popular community-based School of Performing Arts division worried that their kids were going to be shortchanged as attention shifted to professional training for the new Colburn Conservatory of Music students. And there was a classic Los Angeles concern: parking. The parents complained about that, as well as the elimination of a 5% early tuition discount (even though a $50 once-a-year registration fee was also eliminated). By December, complaints about the parking had died down, but the issue of reviving the early discount fee was still under consideration.

Segerstrom suit

Like Walt Disney Concert Hall before it, the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall couldn’t get through its infancy without a dissonant wind section of attorneys piping up. In August, less than a year after the new hall had opened, the Orange County Performing Artscenter sued its architect, Cesar A. Pelli and its contractor, the construction giant Fluor Corp., alleging that miscues on both their parts had led to more than $30 million in cost overruns on the $240-million project. As architect and builder asserted that it was the other guy’s fault, the local Superior Court promptly filed the whole shebang in its “complex litigation” bin.

Changing the dial

Classical music fans were left crying in their chardonnay when their favored fare disappeared from the right side of the FM dial on Feb. 26. After 18 years, ostinato, vibrato and pizzicato turned to twangin’ and two-steppin’ at 105 on the FM band as “K-Mozart” gave way to “Go Country 105.” Saying the classics weren’t pulling in enough advertising for an FM showcase, station owner Saul Levine switched them to a sister AM station where the sound and reach were inferior; with the AM ratings predictably dismal, classical went dead by Halloween. Many listeners gravitated to the lone full-time classical station left standing, KUSC-FM (91.5). As a result, the listener-supported nonprofit station set new fundraising marks, topping $1 million in each of its first two pledge drives following the abdication of K-Mozart, the former classical ratings king.

Borrowed bounty

Small-is-beautiful was the ethic at Muzeo, a 20,000-square-foot exhibition hall in downtown Anaheim that debuted in October with a touring show of ancient Roman art, and a flexible and frugal game plan. Instead of trying to build a collection of its own, Muzeo would rent rather than buy, bringing in three traveling exhibitions a year. Looking to turn its downtown into a walkable destination, the city invested $5.7 million to create Muzeo out of a historic post office building and a new, adjacent structure that has Muzeo galleries downstairs and condos on the floors above. In Encinitas, exhibition and dwelling spaces merged in the $6-million Lux Art Institute, which opened in November. Under a single roof are a cushy apartment for invited resident artists, who’ll stay for a month or two, and a combination gallery and studio where the public can observe and hobnob with the guest artists while they work. Bigger-ticket ribbon-cuttings are in the offing in 2008, with the February opening of LACMA’s $156-million reconfiguration and expansion, which includes the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum, and reopenings of the Huntington Art Gallery in San Marino and the Mark Taper Forum after makeovers costing $20 million and $30 million, respectively.

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diane.haithman@latimes.com

Staff writers Mike Boehm, Lynne Heffley, Christopher Knight, Charles McNulty, Suzanne Muchnic, Chris Pasles, Lewis Segal and Mark Swed contributed to this report.