TAKING STOCK OF STATE OF THE ARTS

It is a measure of dedication, or eccentricity, or both, when 500 people will give up the pleasures of a bright, sun-warmed springlike Saturday and sit indoors to ponder the arts.

The 9-to-5 session on the campus of San Diego State University was called “Speaking of the Arts.” Three panels, one each of creators, critics and funders, talked about what they do, how they do it and what they feel as they take the pulse of the present state of the arts.

No ringing conclusions were reached. There was some predictable cross fire as the artists, notably playwright Edward Albee, spoke of the blighting effect of the critics. The critics, including Ed Wilson, theater critic of the Wall Street Journal, and Martin Bernheimer from this newspaper, defended the earnestness and nobility of their cause.

I would like to think that that particular game ended in a draw, but there was no official scorer and this may be wistful thinking on my part. What emerged--and not exactly hold-the-presses news, either--was that negative reviews stay in memory longer than the positive ones, stinging all the while, but that all criticism is not created equal, any more than art is.

Critics are not fond of the negative power they may have (a point eloquently made by Greg Palmer, arts critic of KING-TV in Seattle, who must wrestle with truth in 90-second doses). The serious critic has paid his own dues--saturating himself in art history, for example, as Robert Pincus of the San Diego Union pointed out.

Still, critics have an image problem, no doubt about it, and when Albee cites instances of critical myopia about his own work, or remarks on one New York critic’s “pathological hatred of women,” critic and non-critic alike can only wince and murmur that there is probably always more flawed work than perfection, whatever you’re looking at, or reading.

What the artists, also including painter Wayne Thiebaud, violinist Ani Kavafian and performance artist Rachel Rosenthal, all hoped for from critics was an intelligent comprehension of their work, and even some enhanced elucidation of their work for their audiences. It didn’t seem unreasonable.

The panels met in the shadow, so to speak, of the canceling of its season by the San Diego Symphony, so that the question of the funding of those arts that can’t be self-sustaining carried a particular resonance.

Steven Lavine, an associate director of the Rockefeller Foundation, thinks the next 10 years may be very hard going for the arts. Polly Munts, who oversees Target Stores’ $5-million annual awards to community services, including the arts, agreed that there were clouds on the horizon. So did Stephen Goldstine, former chairman of the California Arts Council.

At a Friday luncheon, Ralph Davidson of Time Inc., who is chairman of the executive committee of Business and the Arts, a 20-year-old organization that promotes corporate support of the arts, noted that business giving to the arts in 1986 grew to more than $700 million, up from less than $300 million only a half-dozen years ago.

The difficulty, as the panelists were saying, is that shifts in the economy and in the fortunes of a corporation can make giving by business very volatile indeed. The turmoil in the oil industry, combined with the need to restructure in the face of a hostile takeover bid, forced Arco, a major and benevolent force in the arts, to reduce its commitment. (Arco also felt, in the wake of reduced government support for social programs, that they were a more urgent priority for the private sector.)

Rep. Thomas Downey, a Long Island Democrat who until recently was chairman of the 190-member Congressional Arts Caucus, offered some grounds for optimism. The caucus has been able to fight off the deeper cuts in federal arts funding that the present Administration has demanded.

(It is apparently still true, however, that the federal government spends $10 million more per year on military bands than it does on the National Endowment for the Arts. “But that’s all right,” Downey said jestingly, “the Russians are way ahead of us in military music. They have mobile amplifiers you wouldn’t believe.”)

Downey’s principal ground for optimism is that in the wake of the contra arms scandal, the Democrats can and in his judgment probably will retake the White House in 1988, and that the climate for support of the arts will improve.

As on most well-paneled days, no resounding truths emerged, or if they did I missed them. Still, according to Beeb Salzer of San Diego State’s drama department, who organized the day, the program sold out a week ahead of time and another hall of equal size probably could have been filled.

The rhetoric about the arts and their heavy importance in the quality of life has been a fact of life throughout the postwar period in the United States. If we hear less of it now, it is perhaps because it seems a gospel nobody needs to preach any more. The case for the pleasures of art has been made.

But the day’s talk at San Diego State left no doubt that nothing about the arts is easy, inevitable or simple. And the encouragement of the unpopular, the risky, the challenging, the truly experimental, is not going to get any easier--especially as the funders sometimes find themselves having to mediate between the Establishment and the disestablished. Private-sector support for the arts is all too soluble in heavy economic weather.

Still, the passion for the arts abides. Why else sit inside all day, but to say you saw Albee plain?