Christoph Heinrich feels the power of The Force.
Early on, the director of the Denver Art Museum watched with worry as only a few hundred people per day filtered into an exhibition on Renaissance painting in Venice — despite its expert curation and deep significance in the art world.
Then Darth Vader showed up.
“(Venice) started two or three weeks before ‘Star Wars and the Power of Costume,’ ” Heinrich said of the concurrent 2016 exhibitions. “But as soon as ‘Star Wars’ came, we suddenly had 1,200 to 1,400 people in the Venice galleries every day. Clearly, people who had come to the museum for one thing might be willing to check out a second thing.”
That is crucial in today’s experience-driven arts world, but it’s also a model for other big-budget cultural organizations, which have welcomed an increasing number of blockbuster and award-winning shows that have chosen Denver over larger, better-connected markets such as Boston and Chicago.
From the art museum’s upcoming (opening Nov. 19) and the U.S.-exclusive (which opens Oct. 20, 2019) to recent Broadway productions of and the Tony-winning Denver’s cultural assets are driving new memberships and loyalty at traditional art institutions. Each success climbs atop the last one, adding new rungs to the ladder, civic boosters say.
