ART : No Point of View, No Analysis in ‘California Painters’ Book : Criticism: Foundation director Henry T. Hopkins and photographer Jim McHugh have fine credentials, but their book is little more than pictures.

Maybe we’re victims of the Age of the Short Attention Span. Perhaps a major marketing study has conclusively proven that people who like art don’t like to read. But for some reason, we lack a comprehensive book on the art of California.

Oh, there are a few glossy offerings loaded with reproductions of work and stylish shots of artists. But there’s no serious discussion of the art. That embarrassing lack--which would seem to reinforce all the cliches about airhead Californians--was brought home once again a few weeks ago.

On the roster of a lunchtime speakers’ program at the Balboa Bay Club that also featured Sylvester Stallone’s astrologer mother (oh, those celebrity-conscious Southern Californians!) were Henry T. Hopkins and Jim McHugh, author and photographer of “California Painters: New Work,” published by Chronicle Books.

Hopkins is well known as the director of the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation in Los Angeles; his long career in the museum world also includes a stint as a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the directorship of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. McHugh is an established Los Angeles photographer who works regularly for magazines such as People, Life, Art News, Connoisseur, Architectural Digest and L.A. Style.

The credentials are fine; the book is not. Its limitations begin with the title. Clearly, we aren’t going to be reading anything about sculpture, photography, video, installation art, performance art or conceptual work. Hopkins explains his reasoning in his meager seven-page introduction. Well, sort of.

“With this overwhelming expansion” of the number of artists working in the state “in mind,” he writes, “it seems appropriate to provide a modest historical vantage from which to view some of the main currents that now make up the California scene.”

“Appropriate,” in this context, really seems to mean “easier.” More significantly, Hopkins seems to have an old-fashioned view of art as a great big pie handily sliced into different media. But what really defines artists today are their various intellectual approaches to art, not whether they work with a brush or a blowtorch. It would have been more to the point if Hopkins had simply offered us a group of artists whose ways of thinking about the world interested him--regardless of whether they made paintings, comic books or colossal sculptures.

In any case, point of view and analysis are nowhere to be found in this book. After zipping breezily through the history of California painting, Hopkins doffs his cap to the growth of art-museum collections, the new, improved crop of curators who tend them, and the burgeoning contemporary art gallery scene.

He winds up to a pitch worthy of a Chamber of Commerce brochure (“Destiny and a solid economic base seem to be shaping California as the new creative center of the nation”), then segues to 124 pages of photographs of artists and paintings, garnished with brief, frequently goofy, remarks attributed to the artists (a few of which are simply reprinted from other sources).

The 41 artists are the usual suspects--older and younger high-profile figures. Attention is carefully meted out to female, black and Latino artists and to one artist of Asian descent. The Northern Californians include Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, Christopher Brown, Robert Colescott, Roy de Forest, Robert Hudson, Oliver Jackson, Jess, Nathan Oliveira, Raymond Saunders and Paul Wonner. The Southern Californians include Lita Albuquerque, Peter Alexander, Carlos Almaraz (who died after the book was published), Billy Al Bengston, Mary Corse, Charles Garabedian, Jill Giegerich, David Hockney, Craig Kauffman, Ed Moses, Alexis Smith and Masami Teraoka.

Not that you would know where any of them live--or where they were born or how old they are or where they’ve studied and shown--from reading this book. What you will learn, if you turn to the last pages, are the cities where their dealers are. The flagrant lack of scholarship coupled with the list of dealers leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Why not just have the dealers chip in to produce a book that is frankly marketed and labeled as a sales tool?

Unlike books meant to be read, the content of this one is nearly all visual--an amusing irony in view of the current emphasis in art circles on the conceptual content of a work as opposed to its superficial appearance. (This emphasis is such that major contemporary art galleries buy display ads, in the national art magazines, that often contain no images at all, only the name of the artist. The same goes for the invitation cards that the galleries send out for their shows.)

The book seems, to be sure, clearly intended for a general audience that may not be aware of such niceties and simply wonders what’s going on in the world of painting today. But we already have other “books” that are little more than bunches of pretty pictures garnished with easy-does-it snippets of text.

McHugh’s portraits of the artists are thoughtful and mostly low-key (a few are more playful, such as the shot of Alexis Smith leaning into a display of the odds and ends that go into her collages). Photographing artists is essentially a labor of love, he says, done in odd moments between big commercial jobs.

But, for heaven’s sake, isn’t it time for somebody in the know to offer up fresh ideas about what’s going on in this state? About the themes and the styles and the approaches? About the increasing globalization of California art, the demise of the old-boys club, the fall of the Bay Area, the rise of Los Angeles, the extent that New York still leads the U.S. art world?

Isn’t it time for someone to kick away the cliches about proximity to Hollywood and the “car culture” and stress the other themes that a younger crop of Southern California artist are far more concerned with?

It’s been more than 16 years since 1974, when Peter Plagens, then a leading West Coast art critic, published a slender volume called “The Sunshine Muse: Contemporary Art on the West Coast.” In the meantime, art in Southern California has become a vastly more complex and glorious thing, and no one has dared take its pulse. Why?

An acquisitions editor for a top-flight academic publishing house with whom I chatted at a social event recently pooh-poohed the notion that California art is as significant as its New York cousin. Yet he agreed there was a place for a book discussing why this might be so.

In fact, he admitted, he has a working agreement with someone extremely well qualified to do the job. Maybe someday the manuscript will be completed and we’ll be able to hash out all the ways we agree or disagree with this writer’s analysis of the situation. The kind of writing that sparks such informed, impassioned discussions is one of the chief distinctions of a major art center.

Ironically, Hopkins himself wrote in the February newsletter of the Saxon-Lee Gallery in Los Angeles: “Unfortunately, many excellent writers . . . deeply committed to the arts write in frustration about food, fashion and flash since so little serious art publishing emanates from here.”