Touring exhibitions article iq issue 24 june 2009
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Transcript of Touring exhibitions article iq issue 24 june 2009
Issu
e 24
:Q2
2009
…Education…Benelux…Barley Arts…Touring Exhibitions…Legal News…Ed
IQ 24 cover and inside front inset 29/6/09 10:41 Page 1
Skilled in the field of promotion, but tired of
promoting concerts? Maybe you’re just
searching for the family market that live
music doesn’t easily reach? Or perhaps
you’re looking for events that bring a
regular, long-term return without the
stresses attached to a one-hit event?
Any promoter who answered yes to one or
more of the questions above will no doubt
already have considered branching out into the
touring exhibitions market, whose big hits
have been so hard to miss in recent years. With
long runs and family appeal, it is a field that
seems to appeal equally to disenchanted
promoters and eagle-eyed opportunists
hoping to spread their bets.
More or less anyone who lives in a major
international city will have seen one or more of
them passing through: Titanic, Tutankhamun,
Body Worlds, Star Wars and Abbaworld, which
lands in Europe later this year.
Clearly, these aren’t your ordinary shows,
but no sensible promoter sniffs at good box
office, which is why the thread that
connects music and touring exhibitions is
increasingly strong.
AEG is somewhere near the centre of
20
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21
Q2 2009 exhibitions exhibitions
The Expo ExplosionFirst the industry was shocked by promoters turning tofamily entertainment shows. But now it’s the success ofthe exhibitions market that will raise more than a feweyebrows. Adam Woods reports…
it, bringing Tutankhamun and the Golden Age
of the Pharaohs into London’s The O2 arena
within months of its opening in 2007. That
blockbuster is still making its way around the
world under the auspices of AEG Live, while
The O2 has since opened its doors to the
British Music Experience.
EntertainmentCousins
The fact that exhibitions and gigs can co-exist
in a venue such as the O2 seems to make the
point that live music and permanent
exhibitions are really just different types of
entertainment. In any case, the touring
exhibitions business is suddenly riddled with
names from the live sector. Across Europe,
noted promoters are throwing themselves into
exhibition ventures, alongside or instead of
their old projects.
Live Nation, for instance, has a stake in
Touring Exhibitions, the new company behind
the forthcoming Abbaworld show. Premier
Exhibitions, the Atlanta-based company behind
Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition; Bodies; and
Star Trek: The Exhibition, among others, is run
by former Live Nation executive Bruce
Eskowitz. S2bn, another player in this field,
with a stake in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
Annex NYC and connections to Premier, was
founded by one more former Live Nation man,
the veteran promoter Michael Cohl.
So just what is going on here? Are touring
exhibitions the new rock ‘n’ roll tours? And if
so, what exactly are the factors that are
prompting hardened promoters to leave
behind their old lives for a business that, one
might imagine, owes more to the world of
museums than the white-hot excitement of live
music. John Norman, president and CEO of Arts
and Exhibitions International (AEI), the AEG-
owned company behind Tutankhamun and the
Golden Age of the Pharaohs, first
encountered the form when he saw a
Titanic exhibition at the Florida
International Museum in 1998.
“What was interesting
was that the exhibition
had been there six
months and there
were lines of people
queued up through
the museum and
down the block,”
Norman says. “I
talked to the
director of the
museum, who
said, ‘we are going to do 800-and-some-
thousand tickets over the course of the
exhibition’, and I was doing the math in my head
– 800,000 people at $20 a head – and
thinking, ‘this is pretty good…’.”
A touring Titanic exhibition became AEI’s
first project. Over the next five years, the show
span off into five simultaneous touring
exhibitions, each well-stocked with original
artefacts from the vaults of RMS Titanic, the
owner of the wreck and its contents, which has
since been acquired by Premier Exhibitions.
For Norman, a former concert promoter who
has held executive roles at Magicworks, SFX and
Clear Channel Exhibitions, the business had an
immediate appeal.
“Artefacts don’t get sick,” he says. “They are
never late, they don’t complain about the
catering and they don’t lose their voice. There
were just so many benefits.”
Stress Relief
Others who have jumped across certainly don’t
appear to have any regrets. José Araújo,
associate producer at UAU, masterminds the
Star Wars exhibition that has done the rounds
of Lisbon, Porto, London, Brussels,
Örnsköldsvik and Madrid since late 2006, and
his enthusiasm for the exhibition model can
barely be described in words.
“It’s the future,” he says. “It’s a great
business. With concerts, the promoter always
gets the dirty end of the stick and very few
agents treat you ethically. Plus, I was tired of
the same old, same old: here’s the act, sell the
tickets, here’s the contract a week before the
show, do the riders etc. With exhibitions, there
are no major stresses – you plan a year, two
years ahead and you get to help the designers
create what you think will work best.”
In Madrid, Star Wars sold 300,000 tickets
in three months. “How many acts would it have
taken to sell 300,000 tickets?” he asks.
While it doesn’t necessarily apply to all,
there are certainly those, like Araújo, who
see exhibitions as a lucrative, stimulating
new enterprise that offers career
22
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Body Worlds
The Partners Leonardo da Vinci poster
R2D2 forms one of UAU's exhibition showpieces
“ I said to myself, this is my 26th year in the business –I don’t need this. Let all thoseother guys kill each other ”– Firat Kasapoglu, The Partners
27
Q2 2009 exhibitions
promoters a dignified escape from concerts
– at least temporarily.
Firat Kasapoglu, of Turkish promoter and
event agency The Partners is another. “I’ve
stopped doing the rock ‘n’ roll stuff for a
while,” he says. “I said to myself, this is my
26th year in the business – I don’t need this.
Let all those other guys kill each other.”
Kasapoglu has been staging exhibitions for
three years. In that time, The Partners has put
on The Genius of Leonardo da Vinci in
Istanbul, Ankara and Cyprus, backed by
sponsor Arçelik, a Turkish household appliance
manufacturer; it has also had success with an
Einstein exhibition in Istanbul for the American
Museum of Natural History.
“Instead of trying to get 5,000 or 10,000
people to a concert on one particular night,
getting 200,000 or 300,000 people to an
exhibition in two or three months is much
better,” Kasapoglu says.
It is a fair point, and the fact that the right
exhibition in the right city can attract those
kinds of numbers is probably the best
indication of why promoters are getting
interested. Even if ticket prices are routinely
rather lower than for a music show, they
nonetheless mount up.
Ancient Treasures
German promoter Semmel Concerts’ ongoing
exhibition, Tutankhamun – His Tomb and Its
Treasures, is a worthwhile case study. It
opened in March 2008 in Zurich, where it
attracted 262,000 visitors in six months. A
joint promotion with Live Nation in the Czech
Republic took the exhibition to Brno, where it
brought in a further 220,000 visitors.
Since 8 April, Tutankhamun has resided at
Munich's Olympic Park, generating a 17-page
cover story in Stern, Germany's weekly news
magazine. More than 300,000 visitors are
expected before the show closes in August
and heads north to Hamburg for a 1
October opening.
In the meantime, a second iteration
of the exhibition opens in Barcelona
on 6 June before heading to
Budapest and Warsaw. Semmel is
currently working on dates for
Berlin, Dublin, Amsterdam,
Brussels, Copenhagen, Korea,
Japan, the US and Canada,
where visitors are expected in
the hundreds of thousands on
every stop.
“Many of the other
exhibitions – Body Worlds,
Titanic, Star Wars – are reaching
numbers in the same region,
sometimes even more,” says Semmel
Concerts project manager Christoph
Scholz. “It depends on the market,
and whether you are in a large or small
city; and whether you’re between
October and April, which is the best
exhibition period.”
The appeal of a long-running
exhibition that prints money for
months on end is obvious, but Scholz
points out that it can cut both ways.
“It is a daily box office and you will surely sell
a few thousand tickets in advance, but you
need to be nervous every day about whether
500 or 1,500 or 2,000 people will come to
buy an exhibition ticket,” he says. “Every single
day, it is a gamble.”
Costs vary, of course. With museums, film
producers and record companies among the
partners for the larger touring exhibitions, no
two are necessarily licensed in exactly the
same way.
As the lead promoter on Star Wars, UAU
pays Lucasfilm for the right to use the brand
and for the loan of vast quantities of
memorabilia. Lucasfilm approved the
exhibition, which was designed and built by
UAU and its own contractors, and both sides
do well from the arrangement.
“For Lucasfilm, it is not totally about money,”
Araújo says. “Part of the thing about this is
the branding; keeping the name out there. But
the exhibition sells well. The ticket price is
€10 – we are not greedy – and everybody still
makes money at the end of the day.”
Costs of Entry
A successful exhibition can be a profitable
thing, but equally the set-up costs are very far
from negligible. Semmel spent €5million on
the set, lighting and multimedia elements for
its Tutankhamun exhibition,
which recreates the Boy
Pharaoh’s burial chamber in
minute detail. Wherever
the exhibition stops,
Scholz says the cost to
the local
Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs
“They said, ‘it’s a hugeproduction: we have 12 trucks
full of crates’ and I kind oflaughed inside, because I have
done 92 trucks for U2 andfestivals for hundreds ofthousands of people”– José Araújo, UAU
Stormtrooper
promoter generally runs at between €1.5m
and €2.5m.
Stockholm-based Touring Exhibitions,
which plans to launch Abbaworld into the
market at an unspecified moment this
autumn, has not just Live Nation but
Universal’s Polar Music (owner of the ABBA
catalogue) among its shareholders. The
company was effectively created to stage the
exhibition, which means its licensors already
sit on the board, perhaps simplifying the
interaction with what is almost certainly the
world’s biggest all-surviving band.
“The opportunity is huge,” says Touring
Exhibitions president Magnus Danielsson.
“The upside is, it is a fairly
manageable risk. You are not
just doing one-off gigs –
you get quite a
substantial time
to recoup the
investment and
actively work with
it.”
Danielsson, a
former head of
European
operations for Live
Nation Motor Sports
(since sold to Feld
Entertainment) brings
from his former sector
a sense of what makes
a good family-
orientated product.
“When you work with
families, all of a sudden
you can talk to almost
anyone in a way you can’t do
for a specific concert,” he says.
“And in my mind, if you want to
attract a big audience, obviously
you want to talk to as many
people as possible.”
Abbaworld has not met the
eyes of the real world yet, but
by Danielsson’s account, it
may very well set a new
technological standard for
music-related exhibitions, or
even for exhibitions in general.
“I am not saying the other exhibitions aren’t
good, but we have tried to do something more
with this,” he says. “It is more like going to
Mamma Mia! than going to an exhibition – there
is going to be singing and dancing and 25
different rooms telling the story of ABBA. There
will be ABBA holograms, you can go onstage
with them, go in the arrival helicopter, record it
all on an intelligent ticket and take it home.”
Danielsson says Europe should expect a
worldwide premiere to take place later this
year, but that the exhibition will tour the world
in two or three “units” simultaneously – one
for Europe, one for North America, one for
Australia – before a permanent ABBA Museum
opens in Stockholm in 2011 or 2012.
A Perfect Match?
If the appealing factors for promoters include
the scale of the challenge, the access to the
family market, the refreshingly different culture
and the enticing revenue structures, the
reason rights owners are putting their brands
and artefacts in the hands of these road
animals is perhaps even more
straightforward: promoters know how to
get things done, and they live and die by
their marketing.
“We feel that good, experienced,
trustworthy, large-scale rock and pop
promoters have the best
chance of
marketing
these events
successfully,
because marketing is the key to
everything,” says Scholz, whose local
partners on the Tutankhamun exhibition
have included Robert Porkert at Live
Nation Czech Republic and Laszlo Hegedus
at Multimedia in Hungary.
Some exhibitions – even those run by
music promoters – don’t use local partners
at all. UAU, for instance, hires a local PR
company for Star Wars wherever it goes
and does the rest itself. But coming
unheralded out of Portugal to pitch to
Hollywood, Araújo believes it was his
experience with the demands of rock ‘n’ roll
that impressed his prospective partners at
Lucasfilm.
“They said, ‘it’s a huge production: we have
12 trucks full of crates’ and I kind of laughed
inside, because I have done 92 trucks for U2
and festivals for hundreds of thousands of
people. I’m like: ‘you should do Prince – that’s
hard; you should do Michael Jackson – that shit
was hard’. It was supposed to take two-and-a-
half months to build and we did it in 17 days.”
There are also other areas where the
opportunities for music promoters are less
apparent. Body Worlds, Dr Gunther von
Hagens’ ever-controversial exhibition of
plastinated human corpses, has entertained
27 million visitors since its first exhibition in
Tokyo 14 years ago. It has spawned at least 19
imitations, but according to Gail Vida
Hamburg, director of communications for Body
Worlds and von Hagens’ Institute for
Plastination in Heidelberg, rivals are lacking in
crucial details.
“Public anatomical exhibitions are so
different from music events,” Hamburg says.
“The music and the experience of the music
are the main attraction with music events, but
with public anatomical exhibitions, the appeal
and the promotion are multi-layered, more
panoramic. The promotion has to hit
28
Q2 2009 exhibitions
Abbaworld poster
Christoph Scholz
“ The promotion has tohit more notes, have moredepth and breadth in order
to have reach””– Gail Vida Hamburg, Body Worlds
Body Worlds
more notes, have more depth and breadth in
order to have reach.”
While any promoter can market and stage a
show, Hamburg adds, the main challenge for a
scientific exhibition such as Body Worlds is in
creating the exhibits in the first place.
“Running the exhibition is easy enough,”
she says. “But the highest quality of
plastination can take up to a year for a whole
body specimen, so we have fewer exhibitions
than our competitors. Copycat exhibitions roll
plastinates off the production line, very
quickly. They are frequently knock-offs of Dr
von Hagens’ work, but they are able to
assemble a lot of specimens.”
United Efforts
Evidently, the entire touring exhibitions
business owes itself to a high-concept fusion
of museum-standard exhibits and blockbuster
marketing. While promoters come easily by the
latter, they are less able to fake the former,
which is why most exhibitions are the product
of several partners.
Some of the most successful exhibitions
draw on the expertise of both the museum
sector and the live music industry. One of the
trailblazers, Tutankhamun and the Golden Age
of the Pharaohs, which ran at London’s O2
from November 2007 and has since visited
Vienna and the US, is a case in point.
The exhibition is the product of the
museum’s curatorship and artefacts, and the
multinational promoter’s logistical clout and
marketing know-how. “Ten years ago, we asked
ourselves what was the best exhibition we
could possibly do, and we agreed it was the
Tutankhamun exhibition, but the Supreme
Council said the artefacts would never tour,”
AEI's Norman says. “Clearly, they have changed
their mindset since then, and now I think we
are at over 6 million visitors. There were 5,000
artefacts found in King Tut’s tomb, which
means we can have two separate exhibitions
on the road.”
There is no tension here, according to
Scholz, as neither museums nor promoters can
truly replace each other in the equation, and
both stand to benefit from the involvement of
the other one.
“We are not in competition with the
museums,” Scholz says. “We highly appreciate
their work, because the basis of a lot of these
exhibitions is the scientific work they have
done. The classic museum with original
artefacts and the big blockbuster exhibitions
have the right to live together – we are just
putting it on a different level.”
The long-term picture is still hard to make
out. Promoters such as Araújo believe they will
never look back; for Semmel, its Tutankhamun
tour may or may not be the first and final foray
into exhibitions. These are major undertakings,
and they require brilliant concepts and
spotless execution if they are to succeed.
“If we find a strong theme to produce an
exhibition; if someone comes with a clever
idea, we are absolutely open to discussion,”
Scholz says.
Ultimately, sustaining a long-term business
in exhibitions could prove to be every bit as
draining as a life in concerts. But there is
already a satellite industry mobilizing around
these events, and given the success they have
seen so far, it is hard to picture the bubble
bursting overnight.
ADAM WOODS
30
Q2 2009 exhibitions
“ The classic museumwith original artefacts and the
big blockbuster exhibitionshave the right to live together
– we are just putting it on adifferent level””– Christoph Scholz, Semmel Concerts
Tutankhamun – His Tomb and Its Treasures
UAU's José Araújo meets his new client The Partners' Brain exhibition poster