Critic's Notebook: Our arts center is missing the point

There's a distinctly self-congratulatory air around the Kimmel Center these days. Anne Ewers, its upbeat leader, recently gave a "president's address" in the Perelman Theater, floating statistics on attendance, finances, and building use like a pharmaceutical CEO showing stockholders the direction of dividends - up, up, up.

Indeed, positive results of the Kimmel's business plan can be measured now that it has been in effect for several years. The Kimmel today has to raise only 10 percent of its income through philanthropy. It earns 90 percent itself - an exceptionally high percentage for an arts group.

What is the magic formula? In short, by becoming more commercial, the Kimmel has adopted a business model that underwrites the rents of its resident companies by presenting less art and more popular entertainment. Thus, it leans more lightly on philanthropy, which pleases the overtaxed donor community.

The benefits are real. The Kimmel charges the Philadelphia Orchestra a bargain-basement rent. It has taken a greater role in promoting the valuable work of its resident companies, copresenting in some cases and advertising on their behalf in a more visible way than ever before. A more representative slice of the city racially, ethnically, and geographically is walking through the door.

But something has been lost - the visiting orchestra series is out, comedians and pop singers are in - and by becoming more commercial and less about the art, the Kimmel may be improving its bottom line (the budget will break even again this year), but it is doing less in the long term to grow audiences for the arts. It has become more about following public taste and less about leading it. It hasn't hit on a new way of funding art so much as it has settled on a way to fund less art while stepping back from the mission of an arts center - to bring audiences art they never knew about.

When the Kimmel Center opened in 2001, it was the answer to a number of local questions that had simmered for decades: Shouldn't a great orchestra have a hall with great acoustics? Wasn't a lot of terrific art - Broadway, the Vienna Philharmonic, Renée Fleming - bypassing the city because of a lack of venues?

Now the question before the Kimmel is the one every U.S. arts and culture group faces: how to pay for the art, which always requires a philanthropic subsidy, as society has become accustomed to getting entertainment on its own terms and free, and as generations raised without an arts education fail to filter into the audience base as quickly as the older ones who had that education cycle out.

Needs are ongoing. Renovations aim to make what's going on inside more visible to the outside world by moving the box office, bringing the lobby a bit closer to Broad Street, eliminating the black-cube corner at Broad and Spruce, and moving the two lobby staircases so they nestle against Verizon Hall. The Kimmel plans to pay for these changes largely by selling corporate naming rights.

Architecturally, this promises to bolster the Kimmel as a civic space, a noble aim given that, though it is busy at performance times, it can be desolate during the day. But even more hinges on how the space is managed. Currently, the center handles its square footage as more of a security challenge than a social opportunity.

If the Kimmel as a facility still struggles, and as a landlord has done a fine job of supporting the Philadelphia Orchestra, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and others, it has fared less well as a presenter. The third iteration of its prime creative muscle, the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, was postponed by a year, to 2016, and the art-festival-vs.-street-fair ratio of the first two is debatable. The arts lab emerging in the SEI Innovation Studio, and a relationship with SEI that brings in art from its West Collection, are welcome signs of artistic life.

But bigger ideas have died. No longer do major recitalists like Lang Lang come through. The decision to jettison a visiting-orchestra series remains troubling. It's strange to see a European orchestra leapfrog over Philadelphia on its way from the Kennedy Center to Carnegie Hall, or the first-tier nearby orchestras of New York, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh so near and yet so far. Presenting orchestras is expensive - $250,000 for the Vienna Philharmonic, and $150,000 for some others - and Ewers says she spent a year seeking funding but could turn up only half the $120,000 needed to save the series.

"We didn't have the attendance, and we didn't have the funders. It broke my heart," said Ewers.

I'm not convinced. Ewers has been terrific, leading the Kimmel out of debt while making improvements to the building, and, during an extended recession, through difficult negotiations with labor unions and resident companies. Philadelphia is lucky to have her. But here she gave up too easily. To have canceled the one series that brought the city something it didn't have because you could not raise the last $60,000 for a project at a $38 million-a-year organization means you didn't really want it.

It's simply not possible that a region of this size doesn't have an audience to support four visiting orchestras per year. The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society showed what shrewd marketing could yield: When the Kimmel double-booked the Perelman this season, PCMS moved its Emanuel Ax concert to Verizon and sold more than 1,400 tickets. For chamber music.

Ewers points out that we already have a great orchestra. But this is a weak argument. Each orchestra - its repertoire, its conductor, its sound - is unique. By hosting other orchestras, the Kimmel was providing a critical prism of perspective. On some nights, a visiting orchestra put ours on its mettle. On others, it made us grateful for what we have.

It is also unwise to gauge interest in anything peddled at the depth of the Great Recession.

Promoted smartly, the series could have been a tool for cultivating interest generally in orchestral music. Which is why it is emblematic of the larger point: If the Kimmel is to serve its resident companies' long-term interest, it must invest in dividends that won't pay off for years - in children.

The Kimmel estimates it reaches nearly 10,000 students yearly in programs of varied seriousness - a vestigial effort when you consider that that would fill Verizon Hall just four times over. With an education department budget of $500,000 per year, it could do better. Lincoln Center, to which it has been comparing itself in terms of number of seats and scale of activity, serves 42,000 children annually. The Kimmel must do better if it is to fill its 9,000-plus seats a night - in Verizon and the Perelman, the Academy of Music and the Merriam, which it manages, and smaller halls.

It may appear that booking commercial acts is simply giving people what they want. The Kimmel proudly notes that by polling various neighborhoods and communities about what they wanted, diversified offerings have attracted a diversified audience.

But giving people what they already know does not necessarily serve their best interests. It's no trick to match teens to a boy band, or Jerry Blavat to his fan base. The higher calling is to be an imaginative curator. When the Kimmel once again delivers the high school student from Grays Ferry to worlds he never knew by putting him in the same room with an orchestra from Leipzig, we will once again have a presenter operating at full potential.