First on MAN: King Tut adds fifth U.S. venue

Only on MAN: The Anschutz Entertainment Group's for-profit extravaganza, King Tut, has a new U.S. stop: San Francisco's de Young Museum. FAMSF spokesperson Barbara Traisman confirmed that the pay (and pay and pay and pay)-for-view extravaganza will arrive in the Bay Area in 2009.

Tut is currently on view at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia through September, and then in London from November through an unspecified date. It has previously been on view at LACMA, at the Fort Lauderdale Museum and at the Field Museum in Chicago. The de Young is only the second major art museum in the world to allow AEG to profit from their visitors and from their space.

The addition of the Tut $how to FAMSF's exhibition schedule is director John Buchanan's first major misstep. The de Young is one of America's best-attended art museums, and the re-opening of the de Young in Golden Gate Park is one of the more substantial triumphs in recent American museumdom. The de Young doesn't need Tut.

Furthermore, the city of San Francisco supplies about 30 percent of FAMSF's budget and the city owns the buildings that house the de Young and the Legion of Honor. Here's hoping that San Francisco's Board of Supervisors examines why FAMSF is handing city-owned galleries in a city-owned building to a private company owned by a right-wing billionaire.

(Buchanan's de Young persists in a milder misstep: visually destroying an important piece of California art.)

AEG's Tut show is best-known for being attached to a string of embarrassments: AEG & Co. bought a billboard in Times Square advertising Tut as "The King of Bling" (What did the rental galleries known as American museums get out of this? Zip.) LACMA charged $102.50 for some tickets to the exhibition -- and this after allowing museum employees to see the show only once, at 7am on a Saturday. In Fort Lauderdale, AEG's political connections likely ensured that $1 million of public money was spent "improving" the museum so that AEG could make more money by sending more bodies through the show. I wonder what San Francisco will contribute to this list...