With the Denver Art Museum’s show-stopping addition set to open Oct. 7, civic leaders are launching an international effort to brand Denver as a cultural mecca.
They’re attempting to capture their share of the lucrative cultural travel market, convincing out-of-state visitors that Denver is as full of art and music as it is of sports teams and campsites.
The competition for their dollars is fierce. To become an arts destination, Denver will have to battle against the likes of Miami, Dallas and New York.
“It’s an incredibly competitive scene” driven by attempts to capitalize on “the Bilbao effect,” said Adrian Ellis, chief executive of New York arts advising firm AEA Consulting.
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, designed by Frank Gehry, opened in 1997 to architectural accolades, then attracted more than 1.3 million visitors in its first year.
“Their success set other cities thinking hard about (whether) they could do the same thing,” said Ellis. “But one of the things about the ‘Bilbao effect’ is, if you’re the first along, it’s a lot easier than if you’re the fifth, or the 25th.”
Denver chose world-renowned German architect Daniel Libeskind to design its iconic $90.5 million addition. It hopes to capitalize on Libeskind’s star appeal to draw 1 million visitors in the next year, roughly 30 percent of them from out of state. If the plan succeeds, it will more than double the museum’s average annual attendance of 450,000.
“This gives people a timely reason to come to Denver,” said Janet Meredith, the museum’s director of marketing. “There are a lot of cultural tourists out there, people who are going to be curious about Daniel Libeskind’s first building in North America.”
Word about Denver’s cultural jewel appears to be spreading, thanks in part to an $800,000 national ad campaign by the art museum and concentrated efforts by tourism officials.
A travel story in last Sunday’s New York Times said, “Denver was born during the Gold Rush, but the city is now mining its cultural riches.” Stories have also appeared in Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and reporters from the London Sunday Times and British Airlines’ in-flight magazine have visited.
Cultural tourists are attractive because they tend to be older and more affluent, according to the Travel Industry Association of America. They spend 44 percent more per trip on average and stay 42 percent longer, the trade group found.
“It’s a very desirable segment,” said Richard Scharf, head of the Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau, which is featuring the art museum expansion in its $3 million consumer ad campaign. “This audience will stay longer and spend more money in our city.”
In 2003, Metro Denver’s 300 cultural and scientific organizations attracted 11 million visitors and generated $1.3 billion in economic activity, according to the Colorado Business Committee for the Arts. Data from 2005 will be released in October.
But after the opening excitement has subsided, the challenge will become how to turn those initial tourists into repeat visitors.
“Having a celebrity architect will create some buzz, which I’m sure will translate into a spike in the initial numbers,” said tourism expert Peter Yesawich. “But the challenge is not the initial six months, it’s the subsequent three years. You have to figure out how to sustain it.”
Denver enters the cultural season with a record tourist year under its belt, several new venues to promote and some bigger-picture plans in the works.
Overall tourism is also on the rise in Denver. A record 10.4 million overnight visitors came last year, according to Longwoods International.
Two other recent publicly funded projects have outperformed projections. Attendance at the 2-year-old expanded Colorado Convention Center grew to 927,145 people last year, and convention and visitors bureau officials project that bookings will be up 12 percent more this year.
The companion 1,100-room Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center opened in late December and has consistently outpaced average downtown hotel occupancies.
The $92 million Ellie Caulkins Opera House opened last September, and the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver is scheduled to move into a new $15 million space next year.
To keep the momentum going, more than 100 local arts organizations have come together to create “Hot DAM: Arts at Altitude,” a six-month citywide promotion of events. In April, the convention bureau plans to launch Denver Art Week, an annual event similar to its popular Denver Restaurant Week, which offers diners discounts to try new restaurants.
“Of course, there is going to be excitement right now about the art museum, the Ellie,” said Jack Finlaw, director of the city’s Theatres and Arenas division, which oversees the Denver Performing Arts Center. “But it’s good programming and a continual newness of events and performances that will keep the tourists coming back.”
In 2008, the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs is planning a major cultural festival. The goal is to attract 100,000 people to town over one or two weeks, with an economic impact of at least $35 million, said director Erin Trapp.
“We are working to develop a coherent national image for Denver around culture, which we don’t have,” she said.
Staff writer Julie Dunn can be reached at 303-954-1592 or jdunn@denverpost.com.
