Win, Place or Show: Gauging the Economic Success of the Renoir and Barnes Art Exhibits

Abstract

Special art exhibits, sometimes known as "blockbusters", are often thought of as tourism and business generators. This belief is fostered by economic impact studies that bravely estimate the total gross domestic product or total jobs "created" by such exhibits. Unfortunately, the enthusiasm of the exhibit promoters often leads them to the uncritical use of methodologies that exaggerate the size of the exhibit's contribution to the local economy. Fortunately, such methodologies are well understood and corrective measures are available to make the estimates they produce more realistic and useful for advocacy purposes. This paper presents a comparison of two studies done in Canada to provide arts managers with a gauge for realistically forecasting the potential impact of planned "blockbusters". Several Canadian art galleries have recently hosted special art exhibits, notably the Renoir Por- traits at the National Gallery of Canada and the Barnes Exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario. They have surveyed the visitors to them using a corrective methodology that enables researchers to determine which visitors came to the region only because of the existence of the exhibit and which would have come to the region and spent money whether the exhibit existed or not. These data enable researchers to estimate quite accurately the amount of visitor spending that is actually due to the exhibit. This lower, but more credible, estimate is very useful in helping promoters obtain exhibit sponsorship from local tourism businesses who have become skeptical of the exaggerated claims of economic impact estimates based on standard survey approaches.