O.C. ART : Should the NEA Fund R&D;? : A Heritage Foundation senior fellow has shown a lack of understanding in his broadside against the Endowment.

When Robert H. Knight worked on The Times’ copy desk, he loved to buttonhole his colleagues and try to teach them the folly of their liberal ways. He is a smart, affable guy, and we enjoyed the opportunity to think on our feet and combat his right-wing volleys.

Knight and I had a few conversations about art. He once told me his favorite artist was Norman Rockwell. I thought he was joking. Surely he was interested in more significant art than those Saturday Evening Post magazine drawings of wide-eyed kids at the doctor’s office and other kitschy subjects!

But Knight was implacable. Rockwell’s positive vision of life mirrored his own, he said, and his own childhood was full of Norman Rockwell-type moments. In his view, art simply should not concern itself with negative, downbeat subject matter.

Well, the man with this astoundingly naive taste in art is now a senior fellow for cultural policy studies at the Heritage Foundation--a Washington-based conservative think-tank--and the author of “The National Endowment for the Arts: Misusing Taxpayers’ Money.” (He sent me a copy of this 28-page report, with the cheery notation, “Yours for better art!”)

This broadside continues the anti-NEA campaign waged for the past two years by conservatives who are zestfully pursuing a new scapegoat now that they can’t find Commies lurking behind every tree.

Alas, the NEA issue remains as pressing as ever in light of last week’s announcement of President Bush’s 1992 budget proposal, which leaves the NEA at its current funding level of $174.1 million while giving every other arts agency more cash.

Knight’s document is pernicious because--under the guise of common sense and moral decency--it betrays a woeful ignorance of art and its practitioners and confuses untutored public opinion with aesthetic standards.

To right the wrongs he perceives in the NEA, Knight proposes five major changes: Broader membership on the peer panels that evaluate grant proposals; a return to the anti-obscenity pledge 1990 grant recipients were required to sign; the abolition of grants to individual artists and the entire category of “Inter-Arts” (which covers performance art and other hybrid genres); increased emphasis on “basic skills in art education,” and a return to “the promotion of excellence as the prime criterion.”

These changes would involve a shift toward “traditional” or “academic” art and an emphasis on the taste of the untutored public versus that of the individual artist or other professionals in contemporary art.

Knight claims that the NEA has “a bias against traditional forms of art and traditional values in general” including a bias against “positive portrayals of religious themes.” Rather confusingly, he says the NEA has replaced goals of “encouragement of excellence” and “access to the arts for all” (the language of the NEA’s charter legislation of 1965) with “freedom of expression” and “artistic merit” as the major criteria for dispensing grants.

But Knight has a special agenda. Although he never defines “excellence” in his document, it is clear that what he really means by “encouragement of excellence” is that contemporary art should resemble highly praised art of the past. He twists “artistic merit” into a phrase of disparagement, presumably because it seems to leave room for works of art that don’t qualify as masterpieces.

Knight writes that the NEA “almost exclusively favors a single artistic style, avant-garde,” whereas “the vast majority of the public” finds NEA-supported art “neither uplifting, ennobling, beautiful nor meaningful.”

His targets range from Andres Serrano’s much-publicized photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine to a major American sculpture exhibit organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art--and scheduled to open later this week at the Museum of Contemporary Art. He writes that it “contained hundreds of undistinguished objects such as rope, burlap, rocks and scraps of wire . . . “

Avant-garde , of course, is not a style. The French words literally mean advance guard ; we use them to mean vanguard. But nothing can be permanently labeled “avant-garde” because today’s vanguard becomes tomorrow’s mainstream. (Impressionist painting was once avant-garde; now it’s the darling of the masses.)

One of the most crucial roles performed by people working in the arts is finding new ways of capturing human experience. Generally it takes awhile for the rest of the world to get used to these new ways--we tend to prefer what we know.

But so it is in other fields of endeavor. New discoveries in science, new theories in the social sciences, new technologies--we may find these things baffling, even ultimately distasteful. Still, we’re willing to offer the benefit of the doubt. We realize we are not experts in those fields.

Somehow, though, many people fail to understand that art is also a specialized field. You need training to understand it fully in its historical and cultural context.

People who are untutored in art tend to have certain misconceptions based on a highly authoritarian, one-track notion of what art is. One of these misconceptions is that good art must be uplifting, ennobling or beautiful.

More to the point is that good art is inherently provocative--because it asks us to open our minds and reconsider our beliefs, the trustworthiness of our vision and the boundaries we tend to draw between one thing and another.

The emphasis on “freedom of expression” that so troubles Knight is at the foundation of the artistic process. However “excellence” in art is defined by critics and curators, it is certainly not a matter of demurely toeing a line set down by a higher authority.

What about meaning in art? Well, it depends on the frame of reference of the viewer. In our broadly pluralistic, technologically driven world, there are few bodies of knowledge we all share. In the U.S. today, more young people are likely to recognize references from popular TV shows than from Christianity, once the sole subject of Western art. Those pieces of burlap and rope in the Whitney show do have meaning, but to understand it, you have have some knowledge of the issues with which these artists are dealing.

Another widely held misconception is that serious art of the past is a set of “masterpieces” created by “geniuses” whose every brush stroke or swipe of the chisel was a thing of beauty and power. In reality, making art at any period in history is a crap shoot, no matter who you are. Most people can accept that a certain percentage of science experiments end in failure without calling for an end to the funding of scientific research. Why can’t they see the NEA’s funding of art in the same light?

Now, Knight might very well object at this point that some of the art the NEA supports is not just hard to reconcile with the goal of “excellence,” but downright offensive. He includes an appendix that briefly summarizes a few NEA-funded exhibits--which he finds pointless or offensive or both--because “part of the NEA’s problem is media reluctance to describe controversial artworks.”

But Knight’s general descriptions provide no context. They are simply bald lists, compiled by someone who does not seem to have viewed the original pieces.

Contemporary art, in particular, is very much about context. During the past half century, artists have become increasingly interested in the intersection of the “real” world--with its vulgarities and contradictions, its messiness and lack of closure--and the supposedly higher, purer realm of art.

History has already given us a bitter taste of what happens when people who know nothing about art take into their own hands the determination of a national art program.

The exhibit that opens at the Los Angeles County Museum on Sunday , “ ‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany,” is based on the infamous “Entartete Kunst” (degenerate art) exhibit held by the National Socialist Party in Munich in 1936 as part of a campaign to stamp out modern art, music, literature and film.

Should the NEA fund the “research and development” wing of art--the one that keeps asking questions and coming up with a range of new answers--or plodding artists whose bland, rote work reflects none of the turmoil and wonder of living in our time?

The answer should remain in the hands of specialists in contemporary art. The answer should not be in the hand of the frankly art-ignorant public, or with equally ignorant members of political organizations looking for ways to promote their social programs by creating spurious “scandals.”