Anyone who picks up a magazine titled MOVE! has a right to ask, "Where exactly do you expect me to go?" If you open the magazine to an article about Ruder Finn Arts & Communications Counselors, then the urgent order to MOVE! will suggest more specific questions: Where is the practice of cultural public relations headed? What trends should I be looking for?

The collective experience of sixty years in the business does not give RF A&CC a
license to tell the future -- although it arguably provides us with a more verifiable credential than you might get at the storefront across Second Avenue from our office
labeled "Psychic Advisor." We know what RF A&CC did at the beginning: it served clients who were rooted in their locale, tightly focused on domestic audiences, and heavily dependent on print outlets. And we know what RF A&CC does today: it serves clients who operate globally, concern themselves with the overseas public as much as local audiences, and labor continually to make their messages heard in a vast echo chamber of print, broadcast and digital media.

Where do we expect to go? By looking back to see how we arrived at today's version of cultural public relations, we can get a rough idea of what the future might hold. In the beginning, it was not at all clear that our practice would reach beyond midtown Manhattan -- or even, perhaps, beyond our front door. When William Ruder and David Finn founded their company in 1948, they called it Art In Industry, Inc., with the goal of pursuing a valuable but very novel mission: to interest the business community in fine arts programs as a way of achieving corporate public relations benefits, and in the process to provide new sources of support for the arts. Of course, some corporations were already identifying themselves with the arts -- a notable example being Texaco, which in 1940 stepped forward to support the Metropolitan Opera's weekly radio broadcast, which for some time had been struggling without a sponsor. A few such marriages between the business world and the art world existed in 1948 -- but nobody had yet tried to build a public-relations company with the specific aim of arranging such matches.

And for a while it looked as if there was a good reason why nobody had tried it. Companies did not rush to accept this new service. Art In Industry, Inc. had to rename
itself Ruder Finn and take on other sorts of work before it fi nally brought in the first client willing to attempt a cultural promotion. An insurance brokerage firm headed by Michael Levy was moving to new quarters in Manhattan and wanted to draw attention to its offices. Ruder Finn proposed an idea: to invite art galleries to lend paintings that would be installed and exhibited in the fi rm's new offices for three months. Ruder Finn brought journalists to see the paintings installed around the desks of the brokers and actuaries. Under Ruder Finn's guidance, the company sponsored a conference about art and business and this resulted in impressive media coverage including a New Yorker
article. Th e program worked -- and not only did the insurance firm get the press coverage
that it wanted, but Ruder Finn gained the attention of other businesses in search of
creative PR.

From that point forward, Ruder Finn and its Arts & Communications Counselors division was an integral part of the so-called Culture Boom of the 1950s, '60s and '70s. This was a period of extraordinary institutional growth in the arts in America. Here are three of the key developments we can identify as we look back:

-For the first time, urban planners and the business elite were looking to the arts to spur the economic and social development of entire sections of cities. The pioneering initiative, of course, was the building of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in
Manhattan, which broke ground in 1959 through the eff orts of New York City Planning Commissioner Robert Moses. Ruder Finn played a role in the Lincoln Center by arranging for one of our clients, Albert List, to cover the cost of the great Henry Moore sculpture in the pool and to initiate the poster program designed by outstanding graphics artists. In the
creation of the Lincoln Center, the boards of trustees of the Metropolitan Opera, the
New York Philharmonic, and the New York City Ballet and a group of business leaders were brought together under the chairmanship of John D. Rockefeller III and he also became a Ruder Finn client. Over the next years, RF A&CC was often involved with the building of other arts complexes in other cities -- and we are now involved once again with Lincoln Center, helping to raise awareness of its redevelopment program and upcoming 50th-anniversary celebrations.

-After the founding of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965, members of the business community began to feel the need for a private-sector organization as a counterpart to this public agency. In 1967, at the urging of David Rockefeller, a group of corporate leaders formed the Business Committee for the Arts (BCA), a not-for-profi t organization dedicated to encouraging, inspiring, and stimulating businesses to support the arts in the workplace, in education, and in the community. We worked with the BCA almost from the beginning. Of particular importance for this initiative was the fact that
BCA was conceived as a national organization. Its members were no longer thinking
primarily in terms of civic pride and civic improvement -- which had been the classic
American model since the 19th century -- but instead were thinking about the benefit of the arts in the many communities in which they did business. Our co-founder, David Finn, had worked with David Rockefeller in the early 1960s, handling the public relations for the new Chase bank building in downtown Manhattan, with its superb Dubuff et sculpture on the plaza, and was tapped to serve on the board of BCA. It is no surprise that RF A&CC to this day continues to enjoy close relationships with the organization, or that corporations including American Express, AT&T, Bank of America, Cartier, Mobil, Nokia, Novartis,
Seagram Americas, Target, UBS and Warner-Lambert have chosen RF A&CC to represent them in the cultural arena.

Finally, there was the tremendous expansion of art museums -- physically, programmatically, socially -- as exemplified at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The National Gallery of Art, which made the American museum more accessible through blockbuster exhibitions such as Treasures of Tutankhamun. International loans and tourism were indispensable to these exhibitions -- and so was corporate sponsorship. RF A&CC was called in by sponsors time and again to help achieve the full potential of exhibitions such as El Greco of Toledo; Matisse Picasso; Richard Serra; China: 5,000 years; Henry Moore: 60 Years of His Art; Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman; Henri Cartier-Bresson: Homage; the national tours of Chuck Close, Anselm Kiefer, and Sean Scully; as well as numerous photography exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art.

From even this brief and oversimplified account, it should be evident that certain clear
trends were in place by the late 1960s: trends having to do with the size and character of
the arts audience, the rising significance of tourism as a force, the diminishing relevanceof geographic boundaries, and the increased interrelationship between business and culture. Not surprisingly, these developments affected the newspapers, magazines and
(to a lesser extent) the broadcast outlets we addressed on behalf of our clients. Th ere
was a culture boom in the media, too, as coverage expanded far beyond the traditional
emphasis on reviews to include more broadbased reporting, profi les, features, travel and
topical stories.

But there was another trend that RF A&CC could not have foreseen. As these developments continued into the 1980s, the arts organizations themselves began
asking to retain RF A&CC. Th ey wanted to supplement their in-house staff s and provide
the perspective that could come only from a company with a national and international
perspective, used to the expectations and schedules of the for-profi t sector. And so a
new phase began in our practice, in which it was as common for us to represent an
institution as a sponsor

What motivated this shift on the part of museums and other large cultural organizations? In part it was the adoption of more businesslike models of administration and accountability, as a way to manage the explosive growth in activity that had begun
in the 1960s. In part it was a wave of new building projects, which demanded greater
attention to capital campaigns and a more intensive collaboration with major architecture
firms. And, in part, it was the increasing pace of globalization, which called for an ever-wider network of media contacts and a nimble style of work.

RF A&CC's work on the openings of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain's Basque Country and The Getty Center in Los Angeles -- both major projects of historic importance -- brought all these forces together and still stand as the turning point
in our practice.

In late 1993, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation asked RF A&CC to develop a strategic communications plan to support one of its most ambitious and controversial initiatives: the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, designed by Frank Gehry and scheduled to open in 1997. Past media coverage had questioned the Foundation's wisdom in developing this museum in a relatively inaccessible old industrial city in Spain and had highlighted the political turmoil in the surrounding Basque Country. Initially working on behalf of the Basque Government, RF A&CC responded by developing a three-phase campaign:

- Phase I focused on the $2 billion urban plan for Bilbao, positioning the Guggenheim
Museum Bilbao as the cornerstone of the most ambitious redevelopment project of the decade.
- Phase II expanded the focus to include the new museum as an unprecedented architectural landmark and Basque Country as a tourist destination.
- Phase III focused on the museum's collection, curatorial program and opening
exhibition, demonstrating the institution's global reach and signifi cance.

In short, we began with the place itself -- not with the art, and not with the architecture,
but with the people and their aspirations. If the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao was to
succeed with an international audience, we knew it would fi rst have to enjoy the full support of its own community. Because many of these people viewed the Guggenheim with suspicion, as a foreign interloper, we helped to arrange for an advance, on-site exhibition about the planned museum, which was visited by thousands of Basque citizens.

As Bilbao itself began to embrace the project, we stepped up our activities elsewhere. We organized trips for the international media and conducted hardhat tours. We developed special events in conjunction with the Venice Biennales in 1995 and 1997 and Art Basel as a way of taking the project out of Bilbao and into the art world. When what everyone dreaded most became a reality, as members of the ETA terrorist group fatally shot a police officer while the opening of the museum was impending, we stepped in and managed communications surrounding the crisis.

What made this experience all the more remarkable for us was that the Guggenheim
Museum Bilbao opened in October 1997 -- and scarcely three months later, RF A&CC helped open The Getty Center as an equally important international project.

Here, too, RF A&CC had been at work for five years, designing and implementing the campaign for a $1 billion project that was, at the time, understood to be the largest and richest arts and cultural complex in the world. Like the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Th e Getty Center had been subject to opposition from its immediate community in Los Angeles and criticism from skeptics in the media. Moreover, the very purpose of the Center was obscure, because the multifaceted nature of the J. Paul Getty Trust was little known. To build support for the Center, with its comprehensive architectural design by Richard Meier, RF A&CC first needed to go beyond the project's image of great wealth and monumental size. Our overarching goal was to communicate the global mission of the Getty Center: to establish the name "Getty" not just as a museum but as a seven-part, humanistic institution, where people of all interests and backgrounds could discover, experience, study and enjoy the world's cultural heritage.

When these two overlapping campaigns were concluded, the results proved to be extraordinary. For the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, more than 1,500 local, national
and international journalists attended press events throughout the campaign, with the
final press conference and preview attended by more than 800 journalists, including
more than 200 television crews. A Who's Who of cultural, corporate and political leaders also attended the opening. Extensive and highly enthusiastic coverage of the museum was featured in prestigious publications and broadcast outlets around the world. Attendance at the museum exceeded all goals and expectations, with more than 750,000 visitors in the eight months after the opening. Public support generated for the project helped to attract significant corporate and private sponsorship revenue, helping to bolster the financial stability of the museum.

As for the opening of The Getty Center, the campaign generated an unprecedented
cross-section of local, regional, national and international coverage. In addition to major features and multiple stories in influential print outlets around the nation and the world, broadcast coverage included NBC Nightly News, Charlie Rose, CNN, BBC, RAI and live, often ongoing satellite coverage of inaugural-day events by local network affiliates and cable news networks. Successful community outreach resulted in visits by more than 200,000 people within the first six weeks of the opening.

The whole world agreed: the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and The Getty Center were extraordinary clients, and RF A&CC had entered a new era of global cultural communications. If this is the reality we have reached today, then where will we
go tomorrow?

Some prognosticators interpret the trendline mostly in terms of the media that must be addressed. We have seen print publications shrink, in both their number and their scope of coverage. We have seen the broadcast media splinter, going from no more than a handful of networks operating in each country to a multitude of cable and satellite outlets. Most notable of all, of course, has been the exponential growth of the Internet media: a truly global phenomenon, which is both profoundly democratic (since anyone can now in effect be a publisher) but also remarkably narrow in practice (since the material published has little chance to be seen unless it is highly ranked by a search engine or posted on a
site that is already popular).

Since we deal every day with a changing ecology of media outlets, we take the
technology-based interpretation of trends very seriously. Nevertheless, we believe the
evolution of the media is part of a much larger set of developments. To glimpse where cultural public relations may really be going -- economically and institutionally -- RF A&CC looks to developments in the Arabian Gulf region, including the Cultural District on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi and the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar.

This is the future. In Abu Dhabi, our client, the Tourism Development & Investment Company (TDIC), is now in the early stages of a 15-to-20-year effort to transform a previously undeveloped land mass about half the size of Bermuda into a high-end recreational destination, residential and business community and educational resource. Th e international beacon for this development, just off the shore of the capital of the United Arab Emirates, will be the one-mile-square Cultural District: the largest single concentration of premier cultural facilities in the world.

On the one hand, the Cultural District will include institutions dedicated specifically to the heritage of the UAE's own people. Th ese are the Sheikh Zayed National Museum, designed by Foster + Partners, London, and a museum about the region's maritime culture, designed by the Osaka-based architect Tadao Ando. On the other hand, TDIC is also creating institutions in the Cultural District that will be explicitly global in their scope: the encyclopedic Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by Jean Nouvel of Paris; the Guggenheim
Abu Dhabi Museum, designed by Los Angeles's Frank Gehry, addressing the contemporary visual arts around the world; and a multi-stage performing arts center
that is being shaped by the London-based architect Zaha Hadid.

What makes the Saadiyat Island Cultural District one of the defi ning projects of the 21st century? It's not just the scale -- although the sheer magnitude of the undertaking is clearly part of the core message. From our point of view, the more critical issue is the project's internationalism: the way the Louvre Abu Dhabi and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum claim a sort of dual citizenship in their very names; the way all the institutions work across borders, to bring together people from different parts of the world (in terms of both planning and construction and intended audience); and the way we ourselves have to reach out globally from our office in New York, using our network to cultivate media coverage on three continents.

Meanwhile, in the capital of Qatar, another defining project of the 21st century has already opened, as of December 2008. Our client The Museum of Islamic Art -- the
fl agship project for a series of institutions being developed by the Qatar Museums
Authority -- is conceived as a new, international center for learning and creativity, and,
in the words of New York Times critic Nicolai Ouroussoff , has underscored "the seriousness of the country's cultural ambition."

A late masterpiece building by Pritzker Prize-winning architect I.M. Pei, the Museum of Islamic Art rises from its own, purpose-built island in Doha Bay, housing a collection of international treasures in galleries encircling a soaring, five-story domed atrium. Th e inaugural installation highlights works that range geographically over 7,000 miles, from Spain to India, and that span more than 13 centuries. A temporary exhibition, organized in partnership with leading cultural institutions, explores cross-cultural exchange across the Muslim world.

Th e campaign that RF A&CC conducted for the museum took its cue from the Chairperson of the Qatar Museums Authority, Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Th ani, who has stated that the museum is meant to be "a place of learning and a platform for dialogue among the world's people." Th e museum is built in the tradition of the civilization of Islam, which, according to the Sheikha, "has flourished among many diff erent people around the world, drawing from their distinctive experiences while contributing to each." But it isalso clearly something new in the world: a sign that new hubs of global culture are emerging -- and that new modes of communication must emerge to do them justice. As if to underscore that reality, the opening celebrations for the museum included a performance by another client of RF A&CC: renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, dedicated to tracing the global routes of cultural exchange, past, present and future.

Whatever challenges the arts may face in a period of economic downturn, whatever
new opportunities may arise on the Internet, we believe that the Saadiyat Island Cultural
District and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha show where we're going with cultural public relations -- to a place that's very different from anything that was imagined 60
years ago.