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

*Live on the Web: Forum on how to measure artists' economic impact

In the arts, composers, writers, painters, sculptors and performers grab all the glory, but they also serve who sit and wonk.

And we, the people, are invited to watch 'em in action Friday as the National Endowment for the Arts presents a live webcast of its daylong Cultural Workforce Forum. From 6 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, an assortment of academics, federal bureaucrats, and staffers from private think tanks and research organizations will assemble in Washington, and in cyberspace at www.nea.gov. They'll attempt to elucidate, ponder and talk about how to broaden and improve the statistical evidence supporting the notion that what those composers, writers, painters, et al do is not just fluff and filigree, but part of the dollars-and-cents fiber of the country.

Panel topics include "What We Know About Artists and How We Know It," featuring an economics professor from Northeastern University, an executive from the AFL-CIO, and arts researchers from the NEA and Columbia University; "Putting the Research to Work";  and "Widening the Lens to Capture Other Cultural Workers."

Arts organizations fishing for funding have tried to play the economic-engine card for years, amassing enough studies and surveys on arts spending and its multiplier effects to fill a bookcase.

But there's at least one recent, specific reason for arts advocates to be seeking better data to support their case:

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.

Obama tattles on JFK as he greets White House classical music audience

Etiquette and protocol probably figure into any proceedings in the East Room of the White House.

But with classical music on the agenda Wednesday evening, President Obama was alert to some special do's and don'ts as he welcomed an audience for performances by violinist Joshua Bell, guitarist Sharon Isbin, cellist Alisa Weilerstein and pianist Awadagin Pratt, with some young student musicians sitting in.

Obama harked back to the Kennedy White House's "Camelot" legacy of cultural involvement, but not altogether reverently.

Here's the humorous insider-anecdote he shared, as relayed by the White House press office in a transcript of the president's remarks.

"Now, if any of you in the audience are newcomers to classical music, and aren’t sure when to applaud, don’t be nervous. (Laughter.)  Apparently, President Kennedy had the same problem.  (Laughter.)  He and Jackie held several classical music events here, and more than once he started applauding when he wasn’t supposed to.  (Laughter.)  So the social secretary worked out a system where she’d signal him -- (laughter) -- through a crack in the door to the cross-hall.   

"Now, fortunately, I have Michelle to tell me when to applaud.  (Laughter.)  The rest of you are on your own.  (Laughter.)

"This is, of course, a unique concert venue.  But tonight, all across America, in community centers and concert halls, in homes and in schools, the sounds of classical music are lifting hearts and spurring imagination, just as they always have.  And it’s easy to understand why.  There’s precision, of course; but there’s also great feeling and improvisation.  There’s structure; but there’s also creativity.  It’s music that defies simple definition even as it speaks to a common, universal language.

"So whether you are new to classical music, or have been an aficionado for many, many years, we hope that you enjoy tonight."  

-- Mike Boehm

[An earlier version of this story mistakenly referred to Joshua Bell as a cellist.]

Related

Michelle Obama tells international audience why the arts matter

Obama takes power classically

Photo: Obama addressing the White House audience Wednesday. Credit: Joshua Roberts/Pool/Getty Images

National radio broadcast of NEA's opera awards will elude L.A.

There will be a recurring California motif at the National Endowment for the Arts' second annual NEA Opera Honors ceremony on Nov. 14 -- but there are no plans for the national radio broadcast of the musical proceedings and award presentations to grace Southern California's airwaves.

Composer John Adams, who is based in the Bay Area and has close ties to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Lotfi Mansouri, former general director of the San Francisco Opera, whose wide-ranging career began in L.A., will join mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne, former New York City opera conductor Julius Rudel and director-librettist Frank Corsaro as honorees at the Harman Center for the Arts in Washington, D.C. Each will receive a $25,000 prize.

Placido Domingo, general director of both the Los Angeles Opera and the Washington National Opera, will offer greetings via video, and Deborah Borda, president of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, will be on hand to present Adams' award. 

The WFMT Radio Network, based at Chicago classical station WFMT, aims to send the live broadcast to more than 150 radio markets, but Steve Robinson, the station's senior vice president, says it's unlikely Los Angeles will be among them. That leaves area opera buffs with the online option: wfmt.com will carry the proceedings live starting at 4:30 p.m. PST on Nov. 14, but Robinson said the program won't be archived for later listening.

"We already do a lot of opera programming, so it's tough to add another one to the schedule," said Brenda Barnes, president of L.A.'s classical station, KUSC-FM (91.5). The station offers weekly Saturday morning and Sunday night opera programs, as well as broadcasts of performances by Los Angeles Opera and the Metropolitan Opera.

The NEA Opera Honors show will feature musical tributes from soprano Angela Brown and baritone Gordon Hawkins, as well as a video encomium to each recipient. Andre Previn will be the presenter for the Iranian-born Mansouri, who launched his career in opera as a student, then a professor, at UCLA, and went on to lead the San Francisco Opera from 1988 to 2001. Broadway and concert singer Barbara Cook will do the honors for Horne, soprano Shirley Verrett is Rudel's presenter, and composer Carlisle Floyd, who collaborated often with Corsaro, will present his award.

Floyd was one of the four inaugural NEA Opera Honors recipients last year, along with soprano Leontyne Price, conductor James Levine and opera administrator and advocate Richard Gaddes.

Free and cheap concerts coming, thanks to CD price-fixing settlement

Remember record stores?

Well, Californians in 40 counties can tap a toe or hum a bar in their memory, to the tune of $549,000 that's been allocated for free and discounted live-music performances up and down the state starting Nov. 1.

The grants, announced today by the California Arts Council and Atty. Gen. Edmund G. Brown Jr., will drain what's left of a $6-million cash kitty that five big CD distributors and three retail chains anted up in 2004 to settle the Golden State's share of nationwide price-fixing allegations.

Under the original settlement, California public schools, libraries and colleges got 665,000 free CDs valued at $9 million for their collections, while individual CD buyers who filed claims received $13.86 each. What's left of the fund for cash claims will pay the piper -- guitar picker, violinist, what-have-you -- for the upcoming performances.

Keep reading to see what Southern California spots will do with the money.

U.S. House OKs National Women's History Museum on National Mall; Senate vote sought

While the great women's rights advocates Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (pictured) surely would be proud that the U.S. House of Representatives voted Wednesday to establish a National Women's History Museum in Washington, some, including our art critic, Christopher Knight, worry that the prime federal real estate where it would be built, the National Mall in Washington, is in bad condition and in danger of being overrun by haphazard development.

The bipartisan bill passed on a voice vote; if Senate approval follows, backers of the private, nonprofit museum, aimed at illuminating the social, cultural and historical roles played by American women, would have three years to buy a parcel alongside the mall from the government, and five years to begin construction.

According to the museum's website, it would cost $250 million to $350 million in privately raised funds to build the facility and pay for its first two years of operation. The organization's assets totaled $533,000 at the end of 2008, according to its most recent available federal tax return.

"For the first time in our nation's history, it appears Women will finally have a front row seat on our National Mall," Joan Bradley Wages, the museum's president, said in a statement -- the capital W in "Women" being her own.

Tours at the Getty Villa will be in Italiano, thanks to peace with Italy

Almost everyone, regardless of heritage, knows a few expletives in Italian.

While Culture Monster doesn't pretend to know which, if any, were in the air from 2005 to 2007 in the J. Paul Getty Trust's executive suite, it's not unreasonable to speculate that something stronger than "Mamma Mia!" was on minds or tongues while the Italian government beat our local multibillion-dollar arts institution with a public relations bastone and fed it a steady helping of agita.

When the authorities in Rome weren't indicting the Getty's antiquities curator, Marion True, and putting her on trial for allegedly conspiring to spirit looted ancient art out of Italy, they were issuing demands and ultimatums for the return of Getty-held artifacts the Italian Ministry of Culture had branded as plundered goods.

Finally, in the summer of 2007, the Getty capitulated, ending the siege of Brentwood by rendering unto the heirs of Caesar 39 artworks that the trust had spent $40 million to acquire. 

But the Italians had offered a carota along with the bastone -- a promise to provide loans of stunning ancient art to ease the pain of parting with all that treasure. And now the Getty is enjoying the first fruits of its Pax Italiana, among them the Chimaera of Arezzo, a famous, 2,400-year-old Etruscan bronze statue of a fearsome mythical beast that's part-serpent, part-goat, mostly lion and all masterpiece.

So it's in comity, rather than chagrin, that Italian phrases will ring forth soon in the galleries of the Getty Villa near Malibu. In honor of Italian Language Week, which begins Oct. 19, hourlong tours of the exhibition featuring the Chimaera will be given in Italian at 2:30 p.m. on Oct. 21, 22 and 25.

You can find out more about the Chimaera on the Getty's website -- in English or Italiano, take your pick.

Amicizia -- isn't it wonderful?

-- Mike Boehm

Related stories:

Art review: The Chimaera of Arezzo at the Getty Villa

Getty Museum announces venture with Italian museum

Getty's accord removes shadows

The return of antiquities a blow to Getty

Photo: The Chimaera of Arezzo. Credit: Fernandoi Guerrini

Celebration will mark 50 years since Watts Towers won a tug of war for survival

With apologies to the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," here’s some theme music  for Saturday’s half-centenary celebration at the Watts Towers of a remarkable moment in L.A. lore: the 1959 rescue of Simon Rodia’s triple-spired folk art masterpiece.

It was fifty years ago today/And they couldn’t make the Towers sway!

But that came as no surprise to N.J. (Bud) Goldstone, a hero of that long-ago showdown between community activists who cherished the world-renowned sculptures that are now a National Historic Landmark, and city officials who were eager to tear them down as a purported safety hazard in danger of collapsing in gale-force winds.

Goldstone was a young aeronautical engineer who would go on to work on both the Apollo mission and the space shuttle program, including tests of the Apollo command module and one of its booster assemblies. But he remembers the test he devised to prove that the Watts Towers could withstand an 80-mph wind as “the most complicated test I ever did.”

Rodia had worked on the three mast-like spires of the towers, and the surrounding, ship-shaped sculptural fantasyland he dubbed “Nuestro Pueblo,” from 1921 to 1954. With his solitary work completed, he gave the property to a neighbor and went to live out the rest of his days in Northern California. Within a year the small house he’d lived in had been destroyed by fire, and by 1957, city building officials had condemned the towers as an unstable safety hazard.