COMMENTARY : A Battle of Wills : FEAR OF THE M WORD : POINT: A critic charges that the hard-line multicultural argument is more about access and power than artistic integrity, with a militant dogma that is snobbery in reverse

So what’s good about multiculturalism, and why is it threatening to run us off our rails into a mean new parochialism?

In one respect, multiculturalism is only a new word for an ancient cry for legitimacy. From an historic standpoint, it makes a just and even modest proposal. All it ostensibly seeks is a realignment of institutional support of art and its exposure with the present realities of who’s out there to experience it.

The presumption is that if art is an expression of human possibility, of shared recognition, some people--a lot of people, actually, now that the demographics have changed--are being left out of the mainstream connection. For ethnic groups, people of color and disenfranchised others, those cultural and performing arts centers that light up the night sky in every major city in the country represent castles on the hill inhabited by a ruling elite, and serve as an emotional rebuke for anyone who can’t get in.

With best foot forward, the multiculturalist would like to tell us that those closed doors stand in the way of realizing America’s true self-image and cultural imagination, even the fulfillment of its avowed destiny as contemporary civilization’s model home of the free. Hasn’t unity in diversity been an enduring if tattered standard throughout our history? With the pressures of population influx swelling their ranks, the multiculturalists had every rightful expectation for a dialogue and an accommodation.

And they got it. Numerous mainstream arts organizations, with their antennae out, have worked towards staging and exhibiting ethnic works long before multiculturalism became the hot issue it is now. Locally, Luis Valdez’s exuberant “Zoot Suit,” as one of many notable examples, was a landmark event in the modern history of Los Angeles. Who could ever forget the searing claustrophobia of experiencing Miguel Pinero’s “Short Eyes” at the Los Angeles Actors Theater (later the Los Angeles Theatre Center)? Or the experience of seeing John Kani and Winston Ntshona bring “The Island” and “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead” to us from South Africa?

More recently, we’ve seen China’s Academy-Award nominated film “Ju Dou” followed up this week by “Nightsong.” Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever” has just opened. Within the past few months Selaelo Maredi’s “Absalom’s Song,” a South African drama, had its American premiere at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Wakako Yamauchi’s “And the Soul Shall Dance” played the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre. Ramaa Bharadvaj and Uma Shuresh brought us the dance drama “Facets of Shiva.” The Sevan Dance Ensemble, Orchestra and Singers presented an Armenian music and dance program at the University of Judaism.

We’ve seen a local art exhibit called “The Price of Intervention: From Korea to Saudi Arabia.” George C. Wolfe’s musical about Jelly Roll Morton, called “Jelly’s Last Jam,” recently closed at the CTG/Mark Taper Forum, as did Milcha Scott-Sanchez’s “El Dorado” at South Coast Repertory. “Mariachi USA II” plays one of the biggest venues in town this week--the Greek Theater, and the Avaz International will be here in a few days to bring us dances from Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

If a number of arts and theater organizations failed to make it out of the ‘60s and ‘70s, such as the Watts Writers Workshop, the Mafundi Institute and TOBA West, others have survived or succeeded them, such as the East-West Players, the Inner City Cultural Center, the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts, the Beyond Baroque Foundation, the Celtic Arts Center and the Japanese American Community and Cultural Center. The City of Los Angeles created a Cultural Affairs Department to deal with the funding and display of art that has tried to encompass the city’s true multicultural composition.

But as the ‘90s began, the multiculturalist movement took on a sharper, more hostile edge as the idea began to take hold among the multiculturalists that Western Eurocentric culture was too much the redoubt of dead white males, a museum chancery in which the laws of Western cultural imperialism were royally invested.

Robert Brustein, artistic director of the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., summed up both the immediate controversy and the larger issues it raised:

“It seems to me that from the point of view of the left the arts have been perceived as a powerful means of rectifying social injustices. Since there hasn’t been significant progress in that area in society at large, the left has turned to the university and the arts in order to create a more equitable social climate.

“In effect this means the politicization of the arts. What we have from the right is the application of moral and political criteria, and what we have from the left is the application of social, political and racial criteria. What we don’t get is aesthetic criteria. Even dead people are re-interpreted in a moral and political framework. So we’re in a hell of a state. No one is speaking up for the autonomy of art.”

The multiculturalist hard-line credo seeped through American university and cultural life with the message that the Eurocentric tradition was, in effect, an anthropologically closed shop. Philosophy ran from Socrates to Wittgenstein, literature from Homer to Joyce, music from Palestrina to Schoenberg, art from the Lascaux caves to Picasso, and all conjoined in a marble canon of immutable oppressiveness. It was exclusionary, racist, sexist, snobbish and effete. And its prominence was owed to one factor--the massive exercise of colonizing, expansionist power. The art and ideas of the West had carried like spores in the rigging of imperialist warships. There was no other justification for its claim to universal appeal.

A good deal of sophistry is hidden in this argument, as well as a generous misreading of European history. While it’s true that for centuries women and minorities have suffered an oppression that strikes our democratized eyes as hideously unjust, it’s also true that a great many artists and thinkers, from Galileo to the Mandelstams, worked in fear for their lives, if not loss of their patronage.

If the last measure of a great work or idea is how well it endures the passage of time, its first measure is how much it does to subvert the established order of things. That’s been the European, and by extension, the American liberal tradition--on whose terms the multiculturalists are free to stake their claim. Oppression can thwart genius, but privilege does not confer it. And in any case, most cultures are organized around hierarchies of value, which includes their arts. Most are organized around hierarchies of power as well.

Another idea multiculturalism has promoted in its new orthodox agenda is that of “cultural equity.” On the surface, it’s a laudable attempt to refocus art in the context of its ethnic and racial identity, and not turn it loose into a free market to be sniffed at by packs of presumptive connoisseurs who know nothing of its indigenous purpose. The idea has been underwritten by the prestigious and well-intended National Task Force on Presenting and Touring the Performing Arts, which met with arts presenters throughout the country to gather information for its report, presented in 1989.

The task force’s mission was to find ways for the arts funding sector, despite its shrinking resources, to create more broad-based community representation. On the issue of equity, it said, “Cultural equity acknowledges that every culture has worth, and that its worth must be recognized, expressed, presented and supported.” Well enough, in principle. But underlying this idea to some is the notion that ethnicity alone is the prime validation for a work of art (instead of being a factor), not its matter of content and execution that transcends ethnic borders with a compelling aesthetic presence. In short, multiculturally based art is beyond criticism.

“Zillions of people make art,” observes one skeptical Los Angeles critic. “But not everyone achieves excellence. History revises art to some extent, and it also determines what will endure. But once you begin evaluating on the basis of anthropology or sociology, you make it very tough on young or new artists who need to measure themselves by a world standard. All art, even the art of children, has its appeal. But if you want to give someone museum space next to Matisse, you’re upping the ante.”

At bottom, the hard-line multicultural argument is more about access and power than it is about artistic integrity or the attempt to root out racism. One of its egregious byproducts has been the development of a new mini-canon called “P.C.” or politically correct speech, “a literal tyranny over the diction of sensitivity,” as art critic Robert Hughes put it. Just what we need in a culture that conducts its public affairs in a language increasingly awash in euphemism and evasion. In the ‘50s, one sundered a dissenter’s argument with the epithet “communist.” In the ‘90s, “racist” and “sexist” are near equivalents, even if they don’t earn you an FBI dossier.

Such is the sorry state of the multiculturalist constituency, a.k.a. “The New Tribalism,” and its dogmatic militancy, an amazing reverse snobbishness that reportedly enables a prominent black playwright to hold George Gershwin in contempt for writing an opera about rural Southern black people. What’s more amazing is the momentum it continues to gather despite its hard-liners’ plaints having been discredited by argument and example.

As case in point: the “Miss Saigon” episode seemingly brought things to a head last year, after a group of Asian-American theater artists tried to insist that ethnic casting be made on the basis of true ethnic type. Anyone who recalls John Wayne lumbering around as Genghis Khan in “The Conqueror” could applaud their case. But does this mean in principle--if the rule is to be universally applied--that Denzel Washington can’t play “Richard III,” Laurence Olivier shouldn’t play “Othello” or that Ying Roucheng can’t bring “Death of a Salesman” to Bejing? And if it isn’t universally applied, who gets dispensation and who doesn’t? The conflict between fair ethnic representation and artistic freedom is one of the most difficult of all. Still, you have to ask, is this true democratization of the arts?

Besides, increasingly vigorous multiculturalism is a fact of urban life in America, particularly in Los Angeles. If you couldn’t get out of the house to see any of the above-mentioned “ethnic” presentations, there’s plenty of multicultural programming on radio and television. There are Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Iranian and Armenian TV news programs; Latino soap operas, news, music and sports shows; World Beat and African music shows on radio and “Sounds of Brazil” on Pacifica Radio, to name a few. In fact, ethnic enclaves are becoming so well-established that the growth of our city might not be characterized by accommodation as much as it is by an odd kind of new communal isolation, in which people bypass each other through arterial freeways instead of becoming exposed to each other’s neighborhoods.

While it may be true that political moment and the sheer force of population influx have done most to shape the multicultural surge, there may be another underlying force that has made the issue of ethnic identity so crucial--the deep apprehension that the Western tradition in America has run aground. If “identity crisis” is a term invented to describe a common American dilemma, towards what condition is an ethnic minority evolving as it gives up its heritage, its symbols, the rituals and ceremonies by which it conducts its passages and interpets the darkness that surrounds it?

It may be too that groups with strong cultural traditions of their own discover that art in America has tended to veer in two directions, one towards the university, where it becomes increasingly inaccessible, and the other towards popular entertainment, in which no human impulse is safe from commercial plunder. For attentiveness and grace, what American activity compares to the Japanese tea ceremony? How much of our “serious” art, in its preoccupation with text rather than meaning, contains both the history and futurity implicit in the Javanese dance? What are the tools with which one protects one’s self, one’s family and community from the modern disease of alienation?

No one can tell how the issues raised by the multicultural debate will play out. Will the struggle create a greater cultural enrichment, or break down into yet another symptom of American fragmentation?

What is certain is that, although the issue is timeless and worldwide, Los Angeles is a uniquely endowed urban laboratory. Its geography places it as a fulcrum between East and West, North and South. Its sprawling size and soft climate are an invitation to relatively tranquil resettlement. Its non-traditional history invites meritocracy. And its allure has been borne on layers of myth, from amazonian paradise to European outpost to American frontier to Hollywood. Only time will tell if L.A. can become an ancient Alexandria of the future, the 21st Century’s first great open city.