LACMA loses 23% of its investments in meltdown year

No arts nonprofit is apt to show a rosy balance sheet for the year of the great economic meltdown, unless by rosy one means red ink.

In the case of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which recently posted on its website the audited financial statement for the 2008-09 fiscal year ending June 30, the bad news includes a 23% decline in the value of its cash and investment portfolio, from $254.7 million to $196 million.

Barbara Pflaumer, the museum's chief spokeswoman, said that by quickly reining in spending when the economy tanked, including a hiring freeze, canceling some exhibitions and postponing a $50-million segment of its ongoing expansion and renovation program, LACMA avoided "any major hiccups that kept us from operating on a normal basis" and managed to escape the large-scale layoffs that have hit many other big museums, including L.A.'s J. Paul Getty Trust and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

With L.A. County footing nearly a third of the bill, LACMA's expenses -- including such mandatory costs as depreciation and interest on its $385-million debt -- came to $74.1 million for the year, down a tick from $74.4 million in 2007-08.

Eight jobs were lost, however -- six by layoffs, and two via retirement vacancies that won't be filled  -- leaving a LACMA staff of about 350. An additional 16 openings won't be filled until finances improve.

Of greatest concern, LACMA saw donations shrink from $129.7 million to $29 million. This is while the museum is trying to reel in major gifts to fund the $450-million campus "transformation" campaign that's in the second of three planned phases, with about $134 million still to go.

On the positive side, LACMA was able to acquire new art valued at $42.8 million via purchases and donations, down slightly from $45.7 million the previous year. And attendance grew to 853,000 from 825,000, Pflaumer said. Maybe $12 general admission for a day looking at art -- and free for those 17 and under -- has its appeal in a rotten economy.

Click here for the full story.

-- Mike Boehm

Monster Mash: Kander-Ebb musical to debut off-Broadway; Andrew Lloyd Webber in hospital; UC Berkeley scraps museum plan

-- Eagerly awaited: "The Scottsboro Boys," a new musical from John Kander and Fred Ebb, will begin performances February at off-Broadway's Vineyard Theater. (Variety) 

-- Scrapped: UC Berkeley has abandoned its plan to construct a new Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in downtown due to a shortage of funds. (San Francisco Chronicle)

-- Speculation: Did David Mamet hurt business for his "Oleanna" on Broadway by refusing to participate in post-show audience talk-backs? (New York Post)

-- Health scare: Andrew Lloyd Webber is back in the hospital because of an infection after his surgery for prostate cancer. (Playbill)

-- Iconic art: The Dia Art Foundation considers documenting Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" as part of a conservation effort. (New York Times)

-- Well-endowed: The Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center has received a large donation that is believed to be as much as $25 million. (St. Petersburg Times)

-- Photo finish: The Tate in Britain has selected Simon Baker as its first photography curator. (The British Journal of Photography)

-- And in the L.A. Times: Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne discusses possible sites for Eli Broad's planned museum; Hollywood's composers and lyricists seek to join the Teamsters; architects in the U.S. received more contracts in October.

-- David Ng

Photo: Fred Ebb, left, with writing partner John Kander. Credit: V. Richard Haro / For The Times

Italian Opera Festival planned for Dana Point begins raising needed $2 million

Professional opera is back on the monetary scoreboard in Orange County, if not yet fully back in business.

The Dana Point City Council voted last week to appropriate $50,000, plus free use of Lantern Bay Park (pictured), overlooking the Pacific, for the Italian Opera Festival, whose organizers aim to make it an annual event, with the first one scheduled Sept. 10-19, 2010. A successful launch would put opera back on the O.C. cultural map from which it has disappeared for a year and counting since the 23-year-old  Opera Pacific went bankrupt after failing to establish a strong enough donor pool to carry it through last fall's economic meltdown.

The impetus for the Italian Opera Festival comes from the mother country of opera, where conductor Stefano Vignati runs the annual Tuscia Operafestival in Viterbo, a small city about 65 miles from Rome.

For Vignati, the prospective festival's artistic director, and his allies in Dana Point, the heavy lifting toward a projected budget of about $2 million begins Saturday with a Founding Members Gala at the St. Regis Monarch Bay Resort, priced at $500 and $1,000 per ticket, with assorted extra perks for donors who give $5,000, $10,000 or $25,000.

Programming for the festival, which will seat an audience of about 1,300 for each of the seven or eight planned performances, is to be announced at the gala. Barbara Manconi, a spokeswoman for the Italian American Opera Foundation established to organize the festival, said there will be one fully staged opera and several concerts that offer an assortment of operatic highlights or an opera done in concert form.

"It's going to be a big production, very high end," she said; tickets will go for $40 to $250, with comfy seating and a well-appointed temporary stage promised for Lantern Bay Park.

Eli Broad dangles a museum and a $200 million endowment in front of Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and a west side city to be named later*

Eli Broad is ready to build himself a west side museum to house his 2,000-piece contemporary art collection, and send it into the world with a $200 million endowment that he reckons will give it a $12 million a year budget before another penny is earned or raised. That would be the largest single hunk of cash ever bestowed on the arts in Southern California, save for the $700 million 1976 bequest ($2.65 billion in today's dollars) with which J. Paul Getty launched the Getty Trust. [*An earlier version of this post listed the amount as $2.65 million.]

The main questions facing Broad are where and when. At age 76, he wants the "when" to be ASAP, with a minimum of bureaucratic red tape. As for the "where," city officials in both Beverly Hills and Santa Monica are vying  to provide it -- Beverly Hills on the southeast corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard, a property that Broad says the city would have to acquire then lease to him for a token amount, and Santa Monica on 2.5 acres the city already owns next to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

Meanwhile, the "what" has gotten much bigger since Broad's plans to build a new headquarters and museum for his Broad Art Foundation surfaced a year ago. A conceptual design he sent last month to city planners  in Beverly Hills call for nearly 50,000 square feet of exhibition space (including a 6,100 square foot outdoor area for sculpture), up from the 25,000 previously estimated.

Monster Mash: Michael Jackson portrait beats estimates; 'Rent' controversy in Vegas; Met Opera's windfall

-- Sold / not sold: A 1984 portrait of Michael Jackson by Andy Warhol beat estimates by selling for $812,500 and a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat went unsold at a Christie's auction in New York. (Bloomberg)

-- Shows must go on: A judge has allowed a Las Vegas-area high school to continue with its productions of "Rent" and "The Laramie Project" over the objections of some parents. (Las Vegas Review-Journal)

-- Windfall: A lighthouse keeper's daughter in Scotland has bequeathed $7.5 million to New York's Metropolitan Opera. (New York Times)

-- Possible deal: Iranian television says the British Museum has agreed to loan the 2,500-year-old Cyrus Cylinder to Iran for three months. (Bloomberg)

-- Repossession: Egypt becomes more aggressive about reclaiming antiquities from European museums. (BBC News)

-- Cinematic touch: Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami is showing a series of photographs alongside work by sculptor Parviz Tanavoli in a joint exhibition in Dubai. (Agence France Presse)

-- Cat fight: Is the public spat between Dame Edna and Michael Feinstein merely a publicity stunt? (Variety)

-- Honored: Eugene Pack's "The Headstand" has won first place at this year's Ellen Idelson One-Act Playwriting Competition in Comedy Writing in L.A. (Theatre West)

-- And in the L.A. Times: Art critic Christopher Knight on El Museo del Barrio; artist Jean-Francois Spricigo's animal photographs to travel from Paris to L.A.; the Getty Conservation Institute launches a five-year King Tut project with Egypt.

-- David Ng

Photo: The Andy Warhol portrait of Michael Jackson at Christie's in New York. Credit: Emmanuel Dunand / AFP/Getty Images

Hope stirs, but the sounds of silence linger at O.C. opera scene since Opera Pacific folded

Opera Pacific died a year ago, and as far as professional opera in Orange County is concerned, the rest has been silence.

The Orange County Performing Arts Center, whose 1986 opening in Costa Mesa set the stage for Opera Pacific’s launch the same year, hasn’t offered opera since last Nov. 1, the final performance of Opera Pacific’s swan song, “The Barber of Seville.”

“It’s definitely on our planning radar, and I’m confident that sooner or later we’ll pull it off,” the center's president, Terrence Dwyer, said Tuesday. Overtures to opera companies around the United States and abroad, including the Los Angeles Opera and San Diego Opera, haven’t borne fruit.

“Cost is the main thing,” Dwyer said. “It’s very expensive, and ticket sales are not the easiest.” After an opera-less season, Dwyer said, nothing has developed for the 2010-11 season, either. Opera is the most expensive and complex performing art, and the center, which has cut back staff in the down economy, is coping first of all with “the challenge of properly sustaining what we’re already doing.” There’s an audience for opera in Orange County, Dwyer says, and “we’ll have to find a way to do it.”

For fans who can wait six months — and who are open to new work as well as the standards by Puccini, Verdi, Mozart, Wagner, et. al. — operatic opportunity is scheduled to knock on May 15 at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, when the Long Beach Opera is booked to mount a single performance of Grigori Frid’s 1969 opera, “The Diary of Anne Frank.” Far from a traditional grand opera, it’s a chamber work for a single soprano singing excerpts from the diary kept by the doomed Dutch-Jewish teen while her family hid from the Nazis.

MOCA's biggest exhibition to celebrate 30th anniversary -- and survival

L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art is getting ready to throw a two-pronged celebration this weekend, centered around a Saturday gala at which pop star Lady Gaga will do a one-off performance with dancers from the Bolshoi Ballet, and, the next day, the opening of the largest exhibition in MOCA's history, drawn almost entirely from its own collection. For the full story on MOCA, its issues and its art, click here.

One reason to party is the 30th anniversary of MOCA's founding in 1979, when a group of contemporary art lovers won the support of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and began planning for a major museum devoted to the art of the present and the post-World War II past. Aficionados of contemporary art in LA. had felt disenfranchised by the 1974 failure of its main previous outlet, the Pasadena Art Museum, which was bailed out by collector Norton Simon and merged with his collection into the wider-ranging Norton Simon Museum of Art.

MOCA's initial venue, now called the Geffen Contemporary, opened in a former city auto repair shop in Little Tokyo, followed in 1986 by the museum's Grand Avenue headquarters. The exhibition "Collection: MOCA's First 30 Years" will occupy all of the Grand Avenue building and half of the Geffen Contemporary, with a single one-day admission covering both venues. The show, featuring about 500 artworks including paintings, drawings, sculpture, photography and video and installation art, will run through May 3.

The other reason to celebrate is that MOCA is still here to celebrate, and no longer in apparent financial jeopardy, a year after it publicly declared a state of financial emergency. As much as arts institutions relish being front page news, they don't want the headline to be "L.A.'s MOCA in Deep Financial Trouble," as it was in The Times last Nov. 19.

More than a month of drama and brinkmanship followed, with MOCA's board eventually choosing a $30-million bailout offer from Eli Broad (one of those 1979 founders) over a proposal from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to take MOCA under its umbrella in a way promised to preserve MOCA's separate identity.

MOCA officials say that on top of Broad's bailout, they've raised $30 million in gifts and pledges over the past year, mostly from museum board members -- and that the gala is expected to bring in $2 million. On a more chastening note, "MOCA New," as the chapter kicking off this weekend has been dubbed, is also at the moment "MOCA less," with spending and staff reduced 25%, and just one exhibition other than the 30th anniversary retrospective currently announced for the two downtown venues.

-- Mike Boehm

Photo: MOCA's chief curator, Paul Schimmel, stands in a gallery displaying Mark Rothko paintings. Credit: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times

Related:

MOCA faces serious financial problems

MOCA accepts Eli Broad's $30 million lifeline, appoints CEO

MOCA cuts staff and exhibitions to balance its 2009 budget

MOCA has gifts, officers and trustees; pronounces finances fixed

CalArts to launch new art and technology degree program

Applying new technologies to visual art isn’t so new anymore.  So the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia is revving up a new program and a new degree – master of fine arts in art and technology – in which the new wrinkle seems to be stepping back and doing some old-fashioned deep, critical thinking about what it means to be an artist who exploits 21^st century technology.

When the school  launched its Center for Integrated Media about 15 years ago, as “a place to investigate art-making with computers…we were pretty far ahead of the curve,” says Tom Leeser, who has directed that center for eight years and will head the new master’s degree program that’s branching off from it.  “All the other institutions have caught up with us…. Now it’s evaluating these new technologies critically” that seems to be the next step forward.

Leeser said students in the two-year program will get plenty of the how-to’s of applying whatever the world’s tech genies come up with next to visual art, performance art, and art that intersects with the Internet’s social-networking possibilities. But the plan is to interweave the making of art very closely with the critical thinking that goes into art theory, so that graduates will not only know what they’re doing, but also how it fits into the world of ideas about art and society.

Songwriter Carole Bayer Sager and two others join LACMA's board

If the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ever  needs a theme song, it won't have far to look for a composer: LACMA announced today that Carole Bayer Sager has joined the museum's board, along with two other new trustees, Ghada Irani and Dr. Richard Merkin.

The theme song's singer, of course, would be Barbra Streisand, a LACMA trustee since 2007. Bayer Sager owns both an Oscar (as co-writer of "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)," and a Grammy (for co-writing "That's What Friends Are For"). The other star name in the world of entertainment and amusements on the LACMA board is Jamie McCourt, whose predecessor in the job of chief executive officer of the Los Angeles Dodgers was Bayer Sager's husband, Robert Daly. With his majority partner, News Corp., Daly sold the baseball club to McCourt and/or her now-estranged husband, Frank, in 2004. Whether that should be an "and" or an "or" in the previous sentence is a leading question for the McCourts' divorce court judge to decide, with Frank claiming sole ownership of the Dodgers and Jamie seeking to establish that they own the team jointly.

Bayer Sager is also a backer of L.A. Art House, a West Hollywood art studio and gallery that opened last year as a showcase for rising artists; profits are donated to the Hammer Museum's Hammer Projects program for emerging artists.

LACMA and KCET among nation's top fund-raisers -- back in the good old days of 2007-08

The Chronicle of Philanthropy has identified the 400 U.S. charities that raised the most money during the fiscal year reflected by their 2008 tax statements.

Twenty-seven arts and cultural institutions made the top 400 for 2008 -- 14 museums, three performing-arts centers, one opera company (the San Francisco Opera, which was boosted by its largest-ever donation, $40 million), seven public broadcasters, the New York City Public Library and the New York Botanical Garden.

Buoyed by a then-high-flying fund-raising campaign for its expansion and renovation, including a $45-million gift from Stewart and Lynda Resnick (pictured), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art came in 167th overall and fourth among museums, collecting $126.1 million in donations. The local public television station, KCET, squeezed onto the list at No. 399, raising $47.9 million.

Overall, the 400 champs of fund-raising managed to eke out a 1% gain over the previous year during 2008. Since the recession officially began in December 2007, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, most charities would have spent about half their 2007-08 fiscal years with the wind at their backs and half with it blowing in their faces. But the typhoon didn't hit until September 2008, when the books already had closed for most of the organizations in the Chronicle's report.

Next year's report will reflect that damage. To get a peek ahead, the Chronicle surveyed 100 of the charities that made its 2008 list and found they were predicting a 9% drop in donations.