ART : Change in Focus at School’s Gallery May Prove Short-Sighted : Art Institute of Southern California’s new emphasis on exhibits of commercial rather than fine art sacrifices higher inspiration for pragmatism.

How valuable is fine art to a budding graphic designer? If a 20-year-old hopes to be whipping up snappy letterheads and product packaging in the next few years, does it matter if he or she doesn’t know much about what artists are up to these days? Well, I’m going to argue that it does matter, but let’s chew on a bit of background information first.

This summer, in the wake of William Otton’s resignation as president of the Art Institute of Southern California in Laguna Beach, the school’s art gallery changed its focus. While the exhibition program previously emphasized exhibits of contemporary fine art, shows will now be primarily related to the commercial-arts orientation of the school--where about 70% of the students are specializing in illustration and graphic design.

For the past two years, under curator Nancy Mooslin--who resigned as of July 1--gallery exhibits featured work by generally well-regarded contemporary artists from Southern California and elsewhere. While the program had its ups and downs, it marked a significant qualitative change from prior years, when the gallery was run by various faculty members and the work bore a dismal resemblance to art-gallery fare in Laguna Beach.

But Russell Lewis, the school’s new president, decided to stop using the gallery as what he called “an extension of the development (program)”--in other words, as a means of attracting members of the community who might contribute to the school.

Instead, he said, “we’re looking more internally.” The gallery “is now being run in the same way as galleries at the majority of all independent colleges in the country . . . as a tool to help educate the student body,” he said.

Photography instructor Antoinette Geldun is now coordinating the gallery program as an adjunct to her teaching duties, while individual shows will be curated by different faculty members, presumably in their spare time. The exhibits will include both art produced by the students and commercial art “from all over the country,” Lewis said.

On the surface, the new plan may appear reasonable. Why not concentrate on exhibits of the kind of work the students actually will be expected to produce once they get out in the professional world? Lewis noted that it is hard to find relevant exhibits in other galleries and museums. (Hard, but not impossible. I can think of at least two galleries in Los Angeles that specialize in either children’s book illustrations or graphic arts, including commercial work.)

The best commercial art tends to be a distillation of ideas launched in the fine arts arena. Highly regarded modern design schools--like the Bauhaus in East Germany and Chicago, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Cranbrook in Michigan and the Cornish School in Washington state--have viewed design education as inextricably linked with developments in modern art.

Lewis said the school is not ignoring the students’ needs in the fine arts area. “Our students are as exposed to cutting-edge art as the next person,” he maintained. How is that? Well, they get exposure in their fine arts classes, he said. And there was a bus trip last year to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art “to see a couple of exhibits.”

But the Art Institute is located in an art gulch (with one serious-minded museum) that pretends to be a home of the arts, and an indubitable fact about students is that they would rather spend a happy day at a nearby beach than drive to faraway Los Angeles and dutifully check out the high-toned art zone.

From talks with teachers at the Art Institute over the years, it seems pretty clear that the average incoming student is likely to see nothing amiss in a tacky oil painting in a local shop window. And famous schlock artists earning big bucks are heroes to these kids, mostly because they don’t know any better.

Since what the art students should be seeing is, for the most part, many miles away, the art should come to them. Having serious fine art in a campus gallery sets the tone for an art school--a tacit understanding that there are higher goals than the need to please a client and bring a project in on budget.

This is probably the one time in their lives when the students will be primarily concerned with theories of art and design; later, the scramble to get work and function in the business world will be paramount. Having works of contemporary art on hand should provoke discussions about the look and meaning of art today, the nature of creativity and the ramifications for the pragmatic world of design.

Commercial art, on the other hand, is all around us. Anyone can check out what’s happening in packaging, magazine illustration, commercial logos, advertising and so forth simply by walking into a store, opening a magazine or turning on the TV. Trade magazines highlight the latest innovations, and so do the big trade shows.

Pragmatism seems to be the key to the new regime at the college, and pragmatism is not necessarily a bad thing. But it can be short-sighted.

Mooslin left after the newly appointed school president told her the school could not afford to maintain her current salary, which was, he said, “at least two times higher than the average for colleges of our size.”

Neither Lewis nor Mooslin will state what she was making in the part-time job, but Lewis said last week that a “reasonable” salary for a faculty gallery coordinator was “around $5,000 (annually).” In fact, he said, he knew of “one gallery much larger than this one” where the curator made $1,500 a year.

Beyond the salary dispute, however, Mooslin had also questioned the wisdom of emphasizing commercial art. “Designers have the whole marketplace as their forum,” she said last week. “They need to see fine arts more than anybody.”

Meanwhile, an exhibit of work by the Boyle family, which was to have been part of the Festival of Britain, has been canceled. The Boyle family consists of British artist Mark Boyle, his wife, Joan Hills, and their children, who have dedicated themselves to mapping 6-foot sections of the earth’s surface with exact molds of sites all over the world. In addition to funding from the festival, the school would have had to pay for $4,000 to $5,000 of the show’s $14,000 price tag.

The exhibit “doesn’t fit in directly with our programs,” Lewis said. “It is not illustrative of our major emphases in terms of what we’re doing in the curriculum.”

Well, in a strict sense, that’s true. But the ingenuity and responsiveness to global issues that infuse the art of the Boyle family might have lit a spark in some future container designer, and who knows what innovative, stylish and problem-solving solution he or she might have been inspired to devise.