ART ’86 : GRAND : A Rising Tide That’s Lifting Hopes Worldwide

So what else is new?

L.A. still basks in the glare of two grand new palaces for contemporary art that blossomed here in the last month amid a spate of art fairs, commercial gallery debuts, massive press attention and gaggles of visiting cosmopolitan artniks. Happily sated with the launch of the Museum of Contemporary Art and the County Museum of Art’s Anderson Building, it seems more than a little redundant to fix high points for the year. We are still recovering.

For all their exhilarating local significance, L.A.’s unveilings joined a larger drift that blends with a still greater tide in the affairs of art. Towns, cities and nations are building glossy art museums as if they were going out of style. (Why do people say that when they mean the opposite?) Our new museums--added to our old and projected museums--put L.A. squarely in the mainstream of a phenomenon that has been variously explained as everything from a kind of secular cathedral building to social ornamentation arriving naturally when more basic economic demands are fulfilled.

Those ideas say that the fine visual arts are perceived as everything from touchstones of humanistic soulfulness to symbols of the attainment of social refinement. Such broadly based appreciation points to the big phenomenon, the continuing popularization of a field until recently was considered the province of eggheads, weirdos, delicate souls, snobs and well-heeled citizens too decrepit for more active pursuits.

It’s not news that this specialized view of the art audience has changed. Crowds for blockbuster museum shows have been growing for a decade. Nothing changed when the folks queued up this year for a rare look at “Impressionist and Early Modernist Treasures From Soviet Museums,” or an Impressionist survey called “The New Art” in San Francisco. The once-esoteric demimonde of performance art has attained a public profile. Laurie Anderson and Robert Wilson are celebrities but the aesthetic they represent floats ever further from art and closer to theater.

But it’s fascinating the way the wind does not change. Its steady direction makes an ever clearer picture of what success is doing to art.

It is ever sleeker, more grandiose and easier of access. It is ever more conservative.

The unveiling of the restored Statue of Liberty last summer was not just a patrioticevent, it was a major art event in which the lady with the lamp suddenly had an author. Attention was paid to the fact that Frederic Bartholdi made this colossus, with a little help from engineer tower-builder colleague Gustav Eiffel. A 19th-Century academic sculptor was rescued from history’s dust heap. After all, if we can praise Christo for the sheer scale of his projects, why not Bartholdi?

Why not then all the old pompiers of the French academy, asked the new Musee d’Orsay in Paris? Just opened and praised with scant reservation, this latest entry in the museum derby presents several typical signs of art’s times. Installed in the goggling space of a restored railway depot, it, like others, puts the art of architecture on a par with purely visual art. It emphasizes design and it mixes the beloved art of French Impressionism with skillful, easily graspable works of the academicians. That sounds like a formula for enlightened conservatism.

These touchstones of the year, the Liberty project and the Musee d’Orsay, ripple out in several directions. They add greater significance to the Museum of Modern Art’s “Vienna 1900,” a show dominated by seductive architecture and design from a period that played on their capacity for crowd-seducing entertainment.

Out here, sculptors wrestled with a dilemma common to the 19th Century but almost unknown in the 20th--namely, how to make an artistically respectable work of art that the general public can live with. Richard Lippold solved the problem at the new Orange County Center for the Performing Arts with an abstract “Firebird” that is basically a work of amusing design.

Robert Graham fared better artistically, less well in popularity rating. Graham makes a fascinating test case of a museum artist going public. His highly detailed figurative work seems perfectly poised to satisfy a larger audience. Unfortunately, his surreal overtones and expressive vectors get him in trouble. His 1984 “Olympic Gate” was widely aggravating to L.A.’s man in the street. Now a recently unveiled monument to Joe Louis is kicking up a ruckus in Detroit.

Clearly, art faces the prospect of losing its soul to Mammon. Like most everything in these revivalist times, it’s an old dilemma in a new guise.

The best measure of that newness in 1986 was a phenomenal flap that arose over a group of paintings by Andrew Wyeth. Art professionals were flabbergasted when, in the dog days of August, both Time and Newsweek magazines devoted their covers to the putative “discovery” of a group of drawings and paintings Wyeth had done “in secret” over a 15-year period of a mysterious model named Helga. The pros could find nothing especially remarkable either in the work or the circumstances surrounding it. But journalists were fascinated by an implied yarn of romance between a beloved patriarchal painter, a beautiful housekeeper model and a big price tag (an amateur collector paid “several million” for the group). The affair became a cause celebre.

Art’s enhanced ability to make news was only slightly less obvious in L.A. when a dispute between MOCA and collector Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo erupted in headlines, or when the J. Paul Getty Museum had to fend off charges that two of its most treasured recent acquisitions were fakes. Once upon a time, accusations against their “Annunciation” by Dirk Bouts and their ancient Greek Kouros figure would have been a matter of quiet scholarship. These days, thanks to art’s popularity, these charges surface in newspapers and magazines, greatly increasing the opportunity for mischief and misunderstanding.

Obviously, another fruit of popularity is the possibility of art being appreciated for all the wrong reasons--for external value, for surrounding myths and yarns or even wrangles over ancestry and authenticity that do not really touch on the intrinsic expressive beauty of the work.

Then it must be time for all sincere and right-thinking art lovers to mournfully abandon the field to yuppies and Philistines.

Wrong. There is nothing intrinsically evil about elaborately Baroque period styles, which is what we seem to be in with a sensational show like MOCA’s “Individuals.” Sensation has its place and its inevitable time. On the up side, popularity will ultimately teach the broad audience greater discrimination, so that, for example, it can eventually put these squabbles over authenticity in proper perspective.

Popularity can teach the museums how to deal with themes neither beyond the grasp of intelligent laymen nor beneath their institutional dignity. LACMA’s “The Spiritual in Art” is an excellent case in point--a graspable theme that wedges open important aesthetic issues. A lot more promising than “Paul Feeley and the Crucial Character of the Framing Edge.”

Of course, chances for trashy exploitation abound--witness a grotesquely overheated Robert Morris show at Newport Harbor Art Museum. Popularity also allows large reputations to grow around essentially conventionally polite artists, like Jennifer Bartlett, who turned up in La Jolla.

Qualitatively, however, conservatism is as mixed a bag as radicalism. Both produce a whole range of art. Consider a year’s fare that included such diversely talented artists as Alex Katz, W. Eugene Smith, Eric Fischl, Diego Rivera, Ed Keinholz, Elmer Bischoff, Jon Borofsky and Red Grooms. All offer skill and a chance for an audience to respond to them at a human level--aside from that, there is only room for healthy arguments over their relative merits.

One is nagged by worries that important stuff is being overlooked in this ambiance of sultanic pageantry, but if one can’t put a finger on specifics, it’s just worry for worry’s sake.

The truth seems to be that the blockbuster has not precluded the sleepers, connoisseur’s shows and revelations such as the Newport’s “Flemish Expressionism,” a wonderful California folk art show at the Oakland Museum, or “The Blood of Kings” at Fort Worth’s Kimbell Museum.

Ask for offbeat wonders, and San Francisco’s Asian Museum pulls “Spectacular Helmets of Japan” from its hat. Ask for the quiet show to satisfy the dandy and the jock equally, and the National Gallery says, “How about watercolors by Winslow Homer?”

They’re doing something right out there on the edge of disaster. They are walking the line.