TV REVIEW : Giving the Arts the Once-Over Enlighteningly

Anyone who’s ever seen and liked MTV’s alternative-music hour, “The Cutting Edge,” may want to tune in to “Lumina: A Video Report on the Arts,” a TV magazine tonight at 10 on Channel 28. Unlike “Edge,” “Lumina” deals with the arts in general and has no host (a plus), but it has the same sort of fast-moving approach and some very similar graphics. And it’s terrific.

If you go out of the room to make a sandwich during this show, co-produced by Connecticut Public Television and New York’s AVR Enterprises, you might miss an entire segment. For that matter, don’t even blink; “Lumina” is edited in a way that frequently veers close to mere choppiness yet ju-u-ust veers away from it every time.

If the pace is breathtaking, so is the range of subjects:

--The branch of Louisiana Cajun music called zydeco.

--A segment of ping-ponging views on the Visual Artists’ Rights Bill.

--One Liberty Place, a stunning Philadelphia high-rise that resembles a modern, abstract version of New York’s Chrysler Building.

--A few comments and performance fragments from Susan Marshall, a challenging modern-dance choreographer whose work was seen at the L.A. Festival last year.

--Some aerial photos of missile bases and toxic-waste sites by David T. Hanson, who evokes both design and sociological aspects.

--And finally, two slightly more expansive segments, an entertaining one on alternative circuses (one-ring affairs such as the Cirque du Soleil, filmed during its recent Santa Monica beach engagement) and an interesting though overly familiar one on painter Georgia O’Keeffe, in conjunction with the current four-city centennial exhibition of the late artist’s syntheses of nature and imagination.

Whew! Six topics in less than an hour. Does “Lumina” offer inclusive, penetrating analyses of its subjects? Of course not. But the show is not nearly as superficial as one might expect.

The subjects are well chosen, mixing the popular with the esoteric, and the method, given the TV-magazine limitations, manages to be generally cohesive, informative and well focused. I don’t know if PBS plans to shed more fast-swiveling light on the arts with additional episodes of “Lumina,” but it wouldn’t be a bad idea.