DISNEY’S $50-MILLION GIFT: TWO VIEWS : Are We Creating Mausoleums Filled With Starving Artists?

Millions for the roof. Pennies for the fiddler.

Nobody puts it that way, but that’s the real arts policy of the United States.

Consider the Los Angeles Music Center. It supports a world-class orchestra, a leading resident theater and, in season, its own ballet and opera companies. It’s always trying to raise money for them.

But its deepest wish is to get BIGGER. For years it has been talking about a new building--or two--or three. Now, thanks to a $50 million donation from Lillian B. Disney, widow of Walt, a concert hall for the Los Angeles Philharmonic may be built on the parking lot across First Street from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Fifty million dollars is an incredibly generous offer. One would love to know how it came about. It would be nice to know if there were any alternatives. It would be nice to know if the proposition was first formulated that the money be used specifically for a concert hall; that it be sited on this particular lot, and above all that the county make up its mind about the offer within 30 days.

Thirty days doesn’t allow much time for public discussion. And there are things that need to be discussed: what kind of building $50 million will buy these days (the new Orange County Performing Arts Center cost more than $72 million); how much it will cost to maintain the new structure once it’s up; how this will affect funding for other Music Center groups; what will happen at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion once the orchestra moves across the street; whether this makes the Ahmanson Theatre more or less viable as a performance space, and so on.

Deeper questions, too. For years, it’s been been automatically assumed that what’s good for the Music Center is good for Los Angeles culture, and that the Music Center’s prime need is a new concert hall. But neither proposition may be true.

Maybe it’s unhealthy for a city’s performing arts to get too concentrated in one place. And maybe it’s significant that the Ahmanson, far from facing a booking jam, is facing a dark summer. Supposing they built a new concert hall and nobody came?

One doesn’t really expect that to happen. But it could be that Los Angeles has built enough concert halls, theaters, art museums and dance galleries over the last 20 years. Maybe the need now is to consolidate the cultural explosion--to build a serious support system for the work that’s done in these structures, starting with the people who actually do it, the artists.

You can’t buy artists, as you can a building. But you can pay them. And a gift the size of Mrs. Disney’s would provide a magnificent endowment for a repertory theater company--a permanent one, like the Royal Shakespeare Company, not the kind of ad hoc company that the Mark Taper Forum fields every spring, when funds allow.

Why don’t more arts patrons think in these terms? They understand the need to endow university lectureships and scholarships. It rarely occurs to them that they could also endow “chairs” in dance companies. Somehow the gift has to be in marble. Marble is fine, but have you ever seen a picture of the original Moscow Art Theatre? It looked like the shack on Robertson Boulevard where the Company Theatre used to play many years ago.

What ever happened to the Company Theatre? The same thing that happened to the Los Angeles Mask Theatre, and to the Crystal Palace Theatre in San Diego, and to so many groups that, for a while, were making a difference in the American theater. Everybody got to be 30. It was just too tough trying to do serious art and keep a roof over one’s head.

That’s what buildings are for--to keep the rain off the artists. Without the artist, they’re mausoleums. This reporter’s heart doesn’t leap up, frankly, to think of yet another culture palace on the Hill, at a time when so many Los Angeles artists are just hacking from job to job--when they can find one.

If only Mrs. Disney had offered the Music Center a $50-million gift, free and clear, to be used in whatever way would do its artists the most good!

But then . . . what if she had?