COLUMN LEFT : Mexico’s Past, as Edited for U.S. Display : A new exhibit of Mexican history may have as much a political as an artistic agenda.

There are times when it’s less appropriate to talk of art for art’s sake than art for the sake of politics. Take the mega-exhibit “Mexico: Thirty Centuries of Splendor,” which opens Wednesday at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and travels to Los Angeles next fall.

The whole affair is on an epic scale. The catalogue alone is as thick as the Manhattan phone book and weighs 7 1/2 pounds. Philippe de Montebello, director of the Met, thinks that “in terms of sheer tonnage” it’s probably the biggest show the museum has ever done. Before the crates were unpacked, the place must have looked like the storage rooms of Xanadu after the death of Charles Foster Kane.

There are lovely things here, to be sure: a tiny golden pendant bell in the form of an eagle warrior, on loan from the Hermitage in Leningrad; a marvelous 18th-Century inlaid pulpit from Queretaro; several of Frida Kahlo’s tormented self-portraits from the 1940s. But there is also a less attractive side to the show, involving a heavily sanitized version of the country’s history and even a whiff of censorship by the exhibit’s Mexican corporate backers.

President Carlos Salinas de Gortari was in town for the opening gala dinner at the Met, as part of his drive for a free-trade agreement with the United States. One problem he faces is the deservedly bad press that Mexico continues to get for its human-rights violations, corruption and electoral fraud. As recently as Sept. 12, Human Rights Watch testified before Congress that Mexican citizens “are subject to an array of abuses including killings, torture (and) disappearances.”

The exhibit, three years in the making, is a lavish piece of public relations, designed to promote a different image of Mexico as both a timeless civilization and a modern, forward-looking trading partner. It is the brainchild of Emilio Azcarraga, chairman of the vast Mexican media corporation, Televisa.

Listed as the show’s sponsor is a group called Friends of the Arts of Mexico. This is a California-based foundation, but its president, Miguel Angel Corzo, works out of the offices of Univisa, Televisa’s marketing operation in Manhattan. Corzo is reluctant to discuss the Televisa connection. He also declines to say how much Televisa has put up for the show, citing a “confidentiality agreement” with the Met.

Televisa, which enjoys a virtual TV monopoly in Mexico, has the coziest of relations with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Its coverage of Mexico’s 1988 elections (widely held to be fraudulent) was so numbingly one-sided as to embarrass even the most hardened PRI partisans. But Televisa’s nightly Pablum serves its purpose in times of economic hardship and social unrest. “Better to use tear-jerkers than tear gas,” a cynical politician once said of the network’s telenovelas.

It’s ironic that Televisa--long condemned by Mexican intellectuals for its Americanization of the country’s popular culture--should now be in the business of selling an image of Mexican high culture to the United States. But the image is carefully edited. There is little sense at the Met that Mexico’s art has anything to do with its history of social conflict. Toltec sculptors, Spanish chroniclers of imperial wealth and 20th-Century Marxists like Kahlo and Diego Rivera, are all packaged into a handsome continuum of genius, detached from their historical context.

Friends of the Arts of Mexico were even allowed to vet the text of the catalogue, and Dore Ashton, a distinguished New York critic who contributed an essay on 20th-Century Mexican art, found her prose tampered with in a number of places. Her description of the turn-of-the-century tyrant Porfirio Diaz was subtly altered to depict him as the man who ushered Mexico into the modern era; a reference to artworks being in the possession of “rich but largely uncultured patrons” was excised; the “odious intervention” of the United States in Mexican affairs became the “immense intervention.” Ashton tells me that she later learned the Mexican moguls had found her text “inflammatory” at a time when foreign loans and funding were up in the air.

Art, like history, belongs to the winners. The Metropolitan Museum spent the extravagant ‘80s encouraging the passionate embrace of high art and big business; its Temple of Dendur became the chic place for the weddings of the super-rich. Now, it has gone a step further, pandering to the political agenda of a foreign corporation that, sadly, is more associated with Mexico’s miseries than its splendors.