Do Arts Spectacles Enrich Our City’s Cultural Life? : Culture: A festival is a moveable beast that can suck the vitality out of an artistic community just as easily as it can make us art-smart.

In 1984, the beleaguered arts staff of a now-defunct Los Angeles newspaper sweated around a conference table, trying to fathom schedules for a marathon called the Olympic Arts Festival. How to cover the most ambitious arts event ever mounted in the Americas?

Someone suggested phoning the New York Times. Surely, its arts staff knew what to do. (Sinking newspapers grab at straws.) The editor of the Times’ Arts & Leisure section was dutifully called. Who would be coming west to cover the festival? we asked.

No one.

What? Nothing like this festival had ever occurred!

“If it’s important,” thundered the editor, “it will come to New York!”

Oh. Our festival was news not fit to print.

But we laughed last. Unanimous praise greeted our Olympic Arts Festival. The city’s boosters boasted that Los Angeles had grown up artistically. Festival director Robert J. Fitzpatrick proved Southern California’s coming of cultural age was no fluke when his 1987 Arts Festival also critically triumphed.

Now, in 1990, comes the coup de grace. While New York anguishes over the “Miss Saigon” fiasco--an Anglo posing as an Asian in the Broadway-bound musical is rejected for racial reasons, then accepted for financial motives--our Los Angeles Festival welcomes Pacific Rim artists from 21 countries, mostly from Asia, Latin America and Oceania. Nearly 290 events at 70 sites in 17 days. No “Miss Saigon” here, but Bangkok artists at the Wat Thai Temple in North Hollywood.

Take that, Manhattan! Now who’s hipper than thou?

Revenge is a dish best served with a multiethnic festival.

But I ask my chiropractor if he plans to attend the festival, and he assumes it’s a wine-tasting event.

I ask my barber, and she doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

I ask my dentist, and he says maybe, but so far his wife hasn’t been able to interpret the impossibly artsy festival brochure. I ask a total stranger, and she says, “Yeah, like, the Woosters, way cool! They got Willem Dafoe! He knows Tom Cruise!”

I ask a playwright friend in New York if he’s coming out, and he says, “The Los Angeles what? Oh, you mean the Peter Sellars Festival!”

So the Los Angeles Times asks Sellars, the Wunderkind who inherited Fitzpatrick’s festival, about L.A.’s indifference: “I’m not running a sweepstakes here,” he proclaims, “this is not marketing for Vons. I don’t want everyone there. I want people who really care about art and that’s enough.”

Oh. Be there or be square. This does not sound egalitarian.

But Sellars’ comment makes me think back to the past festivals. I attended every event in 1984 and 1987. And the truth was stranger than the hype.

I remember how the Olympic Arts Festival opened in Pasadena to sparse attendance for Germany’s Pina Bausch troupe, how so many art lovers fled at intermission. I remember how the “Tempest” by the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, perhaps the century’s most stunning Shakespearean production, was generally ignored at the end of the festival because of “theater fatigue.”

And I remember how local artistic directors moaned about the sudden drop in attendance at their theaters. Where did those audiences, eager for Culture, disappear to once the festival hype ended?

What I realized in 1984 and 1987, but had conveniently forgotten, and what I’m realizing in 1990, is that these celebrated festivals are commodities that don’t necessarily enrich our city’s cultural life. How does a community of artists evolve from an event that occurs once every three years? For slightly more than two weeks, it’s fashionable to be seen at a variety of artistic events, to witness the exotic and the foreign. But a festival is a moveable beast that can suck the vitality out of an artistic community just as easily as it can make us art-smart.

Chicago’s International Theatre Festival, created in response to L.A.’s festival, came as a by-product of that city’s thriving theater scene. But this year, Chicago’s second festival was less than an artistic success, only turning a profit because of the movie star Kenneth Branagh and his mediocre Renaisance Company. Now the city’s off-loop theaters must wait and see how they’ll survive following the festival’s distraction.

Even all-mighty Manhattan has tried to follow L.A.’s lead. It spawned the First New York International Festival of the Arts in 1988. Almost a total bust, that “first” was its last.

But consider Europe’s most famous festival cities, Edinburgh in Scotland and Avignon in France. Each burns artistically but once a year, during festival time; the remaining months their arts barely flicker. Indeed, Edinburgh’s rival, the festival-less Glasgow, has grown into Scotland’s most vital theater capital. It did this by growing its own.

In a way, the Los Angeles Festival is a celebration of fashion. It’s fashionable now to be multiethnic and multicultural. But afterward, how do we support local institutions like the Los Angeles Theatre Center or the Bilingual Foundation for the Arts or the East-West Players? All year long we should be celebrating our home-grown, hard-fighting survivors, who are committed to Los Angeles culture. The festival should be an exclamation mark to our artists’ success story, not a marketing opportunity for self-promotion and civic boosterism.

The most encouraging signs of our cultural growth, born of our festivals, is the Los Angeles Endowment of the Arts. Its year-round sponsorship of local artists is what may make us a legitimate international cultural center.

Otherwise, we’re destined to stare open-mouthed like tourists every three years at ensembles nurtured by government funds. How do they stay together, we’ll ask ourselves? How can they do that? What’s wrong with us? Why isn’t Los Angeles giving the world a community of artistic companies? After all, who among us gets invited to festivals over there?

And when Sellars informs the New York Times that, “Los Angeles right now thinks of itself as a cow town, it truly has no sense of itself as an important capitol,” I bristle. I wonder why this May, Sellars’ contemporary adaptation of Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute,” staged at the Glyndebourne Festival in England, conceived during his brief two-year residency here, depicts a beach boy coming down from a bad trip in a Malibu scarred by fires?

Isn’t this kind of cliche exactly what our festivals were created to erase? Isn’t that perspective exactly what the New York Times likes to print about us?