ART : The <i> Real </i> Britain Was Not Seen in Arts Festival : The Orange County celebration was more a retail promotion than a cultural event.

I tem: British crafts people who gambled a chunk of money to fly overseas and rent booths at “Chelsea Comes to California,” a Festival of Britain event at South Coast Plaza’s Crystal Court, watched glumly while a trickle of visitors gawked politely at what they assumed was a museum show.

Apparently, no one had informed Orange County viewers that the jewelry, clothing, furniture and objets d’art on view, selected by a panel of British crafts professionals, were for sale. Although the confusion eventually cleared up, a week after the event opened several booth occupants were only guardedly optimistic about whether the event was worth the trip.

At the original Chelsea Crafts Fair in London, named for the chichi district where the event has been held for the past decade, there is no confusion. People come to buy, just as they do at any other crafts fair.

It is amusing that the Festival of Britain--whose marketing folks kept insisting they were putting on a real arts festival, not a just a consumer goods promotion--managed to obscure the straightforward commercialism of “Chelsea” in a misty haze of high culture.

Item: About half of the objects in “British Design 1790-1990”--an exhibit of British crafts organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London--were made during the past two years, and many were lent directly by the designer or manufacturer, not the museum.

Since the 1988 appointment of Elizabeth Esteve-Coll as director of the museum, the revered institution--founded in 1852 and known for its extraordinary collection of medieval-to-modern objects and preparatory studies for works of art--has suffered radical changes.

The changes include exhibitions revealing closer--some would say incestuous--ties with commercial firms, a far greater stress on pop culture and contemporary life in general (the current show is a 40-year retrospective of couturier Pierre Cardin), and a reorganization of the staff that overrides the expertise of trained and experienced curators.

In a 1989 article in the New York Review of Books, “The Fall of a Great Museum,” eminent scholar John Pope-Hennessey, a former director of the museum, accused Esteve-Coll of being “a relentless vulgarizer,” an administrator (rather than an academic) who is merely a tool of the philistine trustees of the museum, appointed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

For an annual visitor to Britain, the notion of a Festival of Britain poses a conundrum: Which Britain are they celebrating--the real one or the fond concoction of some PR office?

Is it the average American tourist’s rose-colored set of half-truths--a land where a Queen still rules, tweedy individuals with fancy titles own rambling country estates packed with chintz-covered furniture, universities are ivy-twined bastions of plummy privilege, people drink tea and pick daintily at clotted cream and crustless sandwiches every afternoon, judges in the courts still wear wigs, fancifully costumed guards stand at attention at the Tower of London and trilling accents make every word sound like Shakespeare?

Or is it the Britain where centuries of stuffy privilege have ceded authority to a legion of go-getters and self-starters? A country where, as many critics allege, Conservative Party leadership has introduced a cynical dog-eat-dog mentality--in which government funding of social welfare and arts organizations is dramatically slashed, a poll tax is levied on homeowner and poverty-level renter alike and yuppie greed has replaced altruistic concern?

Is it a country fighting a civil war with inhabitants of Northern Ireland? A country serviced by Third World street cleaners and dishwashers? A land where artistic vitality is fueled at street level by the descendants of ‘70s punk bands and the dogged survival of anti-Establishment “fringe” theater groups?

Unsurprisingly, the noisiest emphasis in the festival was on hoary tradition and snazzy contemporary trends.

The rose-colored crowd got its “300 years of British pomp and pageantry” at South Coast Plaza in the guise of a group of ceremonial royal robes, a sampling of teatime treats, a Rolls-Royce balanced on Wedgwood teacups, an “authentic London taxicab” and a visit from Princess Alexandra.

The Orange County nouveau riche contingent--who’d likely be Thatcher supporters if they lived Over There--presumably got their jollies from various consumer goods events, including the British design show, a model house equipped with British goods, and a series of lectures on business-related topics.

But anti-Thatcher voices were in notably short supply, despite their significant role in British arts today. We heard from their corner only in indirect ways.

Tony Cragg’s sculptures at Newport Harbor Art Museum are often made of fragments of industrial refuse, sometimes resembling distorted natural forms or science lab tools. With the exception of his vast wall relief, “Riot”--a brilliantly “common” reconceptualizing of a type of imagery found in ancient Roman reliefs, using bits and pieces of old plastic objects--Cragg’s work may appear to be apolitical.

But despite the diverse appearance of the sculptures Cragg has produced over the past 15 years, his work overwhelmingly indicates a belief in a relativistic, unpredictable universe, knowable only by direct personal experience.

Some of the sculptures are made of humble castoffs reimagined into new forms. Other pieces are large-scale bronzes that--contrary to the solid majesty of the medium--have a loosely experimental quality. In his refusal to acknowledge hierarchies of subject matter and materials or assumptions of stylistic integrity, he flies in the face of the conservative preference for works of art (and social groups) that are neatly defined and know their place.

Gordon Onslow-Ford, whose visionary paintings (in “Pursuit of the Marvelous” at the Laguna Art Museum) have as little as possible to do with things of this world, loathed the strictures and stuffiness of England of the 1920s, as he said in a recent interview. As a young man he happily turned his back on his native land for the delights of Paris, Mexico and Northern California.

Stanley William Hayter, a painter and experimental etcher also in “Pursuit of the Marvelous,” was an avowed leftist who used his art to support the Loyalists’ cause during the Spanish Civil War. He died in 1988, a year before Thatcher took office.

Calum Colvin and Ron O’Donnell, showing installations and large-scale photographs at Cal State Fullerton, send up some ingrained attitudes of their fellow Scots in gentle ways. But the biting edge of Scottish nationalism, the barely controlled fury at what is perceived as economic favoritism of Southern Britain, is not discernible in their work.

The one imported British theater offering, Alan Plater’s “Sweet Sorrow” at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, performed by the Hull Truck Theatre, had a distinctly literary theme (the poetry of Philip Larkin) without significant political overtones.

And of course the tripping melodies and devilishly clever rhymes of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado” and “The Pirates of Penzance”--the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company’s offerings at the Performing Arts Center--are products of the 19th Century. Even back then, the benign anti-Establishment digs that pepper the lyrics were perceived as simply jolly good fun.

It looks like the only place we can hope to hear the authentic voice of British liberals looking for a return of basic values will be South Coast Repertory’s West Coast premiere of David Hare’s “The Secret Rapture,” which I saw a couple of years ago in London.

At the center of the play is a genuinely saintly woman, Isobel, who owns a small commercial art firm. Her sister Marion is a coldly calculating junior minister in the Conservative Party; Marion’s husband is an impossibly unctuous born-again Christian who runs an outfit called Christians in Business. When Isobel’s and Marion’s alcoholic mother needs help, everyone’s true colors are revealed.

Hare has said that he doesn’t see the play in political terms, which doesn’t mitigate its power: Art is most effective when it doesn’t clobber viewers over the head with a bag full of propaganda. But Isobel’s painfully lonely position--her refusal to make life easy for herself by capitulating to the opportunistic folks around her--says a lot about the temper of the times in today’s Britain.

Maybe you’re thinking it would have been unrealistic to expect a festival partially sponsored by the British government and British corporations to bite the hands that feed it. But that’s one of the difficulties of having a cultural festival enrobed within a retail promotion (in itself, a concept that reeks of Thatcherism).

Had the festival been the brainchild of a cultural group or a Peter Sellars-style impresario, had it been conceived solely as an arts event--with input from a broad range of British arts groups, large and small, radical and mainstream--we’d have stood a better chance of understanding the real Britain, and the overwhelming social tensions confronting it today.