City Arts See Tourist Bucks In Exhibits

In the competition for tourist dollars, Jonesborough, Tenn., cannot play in the same league with Disneyworld or Yellowstone Park. But in October, Jonesborough (population 3,400) drew about 8,600 visitors from all 50 states and several foreign countries to its annual storytelling festival, generating $5 million worth of economic activity in the region.

Last year, “The Age of Rubens” attracted 234,000 visitors to the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio, more than half of of them from out of state. In August, traditionally considered a dead month for art exhibitions, the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington opened a two-month show of pre-Raphaelite art and marketed it to summer vacationers. It pulled an audience from the mid-Atlantic states that raised museum attendance by 434 percent over the same period in 1994.

Examples like these have not gone unnoticed by state and municipal officials in charge of economic development or by representatives of the tourist industry, who in the last five years have begun talking to local arts councils and museum officers.

Increasing recognition of the power of the arts to pull in tourist dollars has led to a host of new initiatives, partnerships and pilot development projects across the United States. Most are aimed at tapping into the cultural appetites of foreign visitors and the fat wallets of a new kind of American tourist, one who is more likely to seek out an art museum or a music festival than a shopping district or a theme park.

Recent surveys by the Commerce Department, the Travel Industry Association of America and D.K. Shiflet and Associates, a private company specializing in travel research, point to a growing tourist population, with the arts and local history at the top of their agenda.

“For the tourist industry, this is a market that is better educated, spends more time at a destination, spends more money, and is more likely to stay in a hotel than with family or friends,” said Bill Moskin, a cultural tourism consultant in Sacramento, Calif., who often works with state arts councils, state tourism offices and convention and visitors bureaus. “For cities, this is a new way of marketing themselves, and for arts organizations, this is a way to diversify revenue.”

With an eye to the cultural marketplace, several cities have followed the lead of San Francisco, whose convention and visitors bureau hired a full-time arts officer five years ago. This year, Los Angeles hired one for itself, and San Diego is now searching for one, too. Portland, Ore., and New Orleans, in search of a comprehensive cultural marketing plan, are now putting together consortiums that include representatives from arts organizations, the tourist industry and the local convention and visitors’ bureaus.

The mandate is simple. “The purpose is to sell the arts and cultural products that we have to the tourists who come,” said Shirley Trusty Corey, the executive director of the Arts Council of New Orleans.

For the arts, increased tourism means increased attendance and ticket sales, a big jump in museum gift shop sales and, in the case of blockbuster events, a gratifying spillover effect, since visitors to a major museum often seek out cultural events at other arts institutions.

But the hurdles are high. Many European countries, especially Britain and France, have long recognized the tourist value of the arts and have marketed them shrewdly. They have also worked hard to develop a tourist infrastructure of information offices, well marked itineraries, printed material in many languages, and small museums that interpret and represent the local culture. The tourist industry and the culture industry work together.

The United States lags far behind, a point made often in late October at the annual White House Conference on Travel and Tourism, which, for the first time, included a daylong session on cultural tourism. The mingling of arts and tourism officials led to some eye-opening encounters.

“Except in isolated cases, there has not been much conversation between these entities,” said Edward H. Able Jr., the executive director of the American Association of Museums. “One thing we learned was the vast economic impact of tourism, a $512 billion industry that generates $58 billion in state and local taxes and a $22 billion trade surplus for the United States.”

Eduardo Diaz, the director of the San Antonio Department of Arts and Culture, described the culture and tourism industries as ships passing in the night: “We have tended to think of the tourist as the guy with the loud shirt, Bermuda shorts and a camera around his neck, while the tourist industry thinks of artists as unreliable, out-of-it characters, but we have common interests.”

The arts and tourist industries realize they need to act if they want to exploit a valuable asset.