. . . and Then We Have the Critics : <i> Uniting disparate art events around a common theme in a three-month festival setting is quite a challenge. How successful was the UK/LA ’88 Festival in doing that? An assessment follows: : </i>

Art

What is an Ukla anyway? Would an Ukla by any other name smell so sweet? Is an Ukla something that burns bright in the forest of the night? We are not sure what an Ukla is but we heard there was one in town. Maybe it’s one of those beasts that’s too big to see up close, like a helaphump.

Oh, UK/LA , the United Kingdom/Los Angeles festival. Sure, we heard about that.

David Hockney. That’s it. The Hockney retrospective at the County Museum of Art was surely the festival’s crowning artistic event. Witty, engaging, masterful show by a ranking British artist. Of course, he lives here and the show had been planned for five years, but never mind.

There were about 200 gallery exhibitions that coincided with UK/LA and every once in a while you’d bump into a British one. The L.A. Louvre gallery had a British sampler and so did the Koplin gallery, among others.

A celebration like the UK/LA ’88 Festival doesn’t make much sense. It was spread out over a staggered three-month schedule in galleries from Newhall to Huntington Beach, so it never had any focus or discernible point.

Events like UK/LA also seem to serve some hidden purpose. Maybe the statistics add up so it looks impressive to the folks back home in the sceptered isle. Maybe there are Anglophiles and leisured gentlefolk who just drop everything else and go to festival theater and festival concerts and festival fast food and have a fine time. Anybody who has a life to lead just doesn’t have time to string it together.

I take that back. The fine arts part of UK/LA came together beautifully in a PBS series called “The State of the Art.”

It is remarkably hip and un-nationalistic, mixing English artists with American and Continental talent, caroming off everybody from Hans Haacke to Francis Bacon and Cindy Sherman. Every Thursday night an hourlong segment undertook broad themes such as Creativity, Politics, Sex or the Art Market. The latter was an especially delicious bit of winceable muckraking that made today’s art scene appear every bit as venal and superficial as its worst caricature.

The tube may be the best way to make these illusive festivals coherent. We can all snuggle up at the electronic hearth after dinner, warm our cultural cockles, watch a Monty Python rerun and go to bed knowing we are the better for it.