O.C. ART : Elitism Doesn’t Have to Be a Nasty Word : In the positive sense of the term, museums perform the job of quality control. We look to them to tell us which artists have something distinctive to say.

Do you have a minute? Can we talk about a dirty word? Yeah, I know this is a family newspaper. But the word I have in mind is elitism.

Elitism, of course, means “control by an elite.” My dictionary says the elite are a group “regarded as the finest, best, most distinguished, most powerful, etc.” Many people seem to think elitism is inevitably a nasty thing, a matter of having your own judgment ridiculed and vetoed by some highfalutin, undemocratic know-it-all.

Recently, after I wrote a column about the wrongheadedness of trying to create art “exhibits” in inhospitable places devoted to other activities--such as offices or cafeterias--several people sent letters accusing me of being an elitist (variant: “insufferable elitist”).

But as I see it, elitism takes two forms. One is that the general public is too stupid and coarse to understand the finer things of life, which ought to be reserved only for people born to money, privilege and a blue-chip education. That’s not my bag.

The other form of elitism acknowledges that there are, indeed, “finer” and not-so-fine things in life and that nobody can be an expert in everything. It makes sense that people who have discovered the finer stuff not keep it to themselves--they owe it to everybody else to spread the word.

After all, if you happen to know where to get the best deal on a vacation home, or which bakery sells the best bread, your friends probably would be happy to hear about it. They can’t prove your picks are really “the best.” But you’ve earned your friends’ respect because they know you have a checkered history with vacation homes and you’ve nibbled your way through a lot of bakeries.

Well, much the same thing goes for art. By general acknowledgment of respected critics, curators and other tastemakers, certain contemporary artists are deemed better than others. It’s not that they are whiter or richer or born into families that can trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower. The point is that they embody thoughts and visions in their art to which no one ever has given form in such compelling ways.

To see work of this caliber, you generally need to visit galleries (the most direct pipeline to artists’ studios) and contemporary art museums, where curators with specialized training devise exhibitions of work they feel is particularly worthwhile.

Are museums inherently elitist? Ah, now we enter the hornet’s nest. Art institutions frequently are accused of ethnocentrism--of employing the same, monolithic standards for art no matter what cultural values it represents. Artists who are women or members of minority groups often are spottily represented in collections and exhibitions. Wall texts and brochures often fail to speak clearly to the non-specialist viewer.

But in the positive sense of elitism, contemporary art museums perform (to a greater or lesser degree) the job of quality control. For better or worse, we look to them to tell us which artists--out of the thousands and thousands that pour out of the art schools every year--have something distinctive to say. And no matter how crazy and snobbish the world of art may be, museum admission is still less than the price of a movie ticket, and art galleries (yes, even the ones with snotty assistants minding the desk) are free.

There have been notable attempts to commission significant artists to do work outside museums, in the urban environment. Such works, however, are usually commissioned by organizations with recognized specialists and strong track records. And the works themselves are specifically designed to function in the real world.

They generally are not paintings or sculpture in the traditional sense. Instead, they imitate formats we see all around us: advertising billboards, commemorative markers, window displays, street signs and so forth. Works such as these are intelligent and sophisticated, yet (unlike much gallery art) they don’t require a fancy education to be understood.

From 1982 to 1990, the Public Art Fund of New York City sponsored a series of computer-generated messages broadcast at Times Square by such artists as Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Mitchell Syrop and Vito Acconci. Other examples of “guerrilla” art include the “Women Don’t Get AIDS” poster designed by the group Gran Fury and placed in bus shelters in Los Angeles County last spring, and the set of nine questions (“Who is beyond the law? Who is bought and sold? . . . “) that Kruger painted in a format resembling the U.S. flag on the side of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles last year.

These public works are not about “appreciating” art, however. In fact, it’s likely that many people who see such works wouldn’t consider them to be art in the first place. The point is that these works may cause passersby--who may not even realize they’re having an “art experience”--to consider certain ideas about the world and their place in it.

This is a far cry from simply parking pieces of art in privately owned public places, as if mere proximity would induce passersby to be interested in art. Gallery-style art displayed in such places inevitably becomes little more than passive adornment. Consider the huge blue-chip works big corporations put in their lobbies: No matter what complex theories may have been involved in the creation of the art, it functions here merely as a discreet sign of good taste, little different from a designer chair or an elegant briefcase.

Most of the art by little-known artists that is shown in lobbies and restaurants and such is selected in the first place for its perkiness and good manners. There are unwritten rules about being a well-behaved piece of art in an indoor public place, after all. You are not going to find the meaty, unusual stuff here (too distracting! too weird!) or the resonant piece that requires a margin of space and silence around it (too demanding!).

When artists honestly feel they’ve honed their work to the bone and given it the “reality test” of outside opinion (not counting friends and family), why should they stand for having their stuff treated like an ashtray or an end table? Why show work in substandard locations where it isn’t likely to be seen properly and taken seriously?

Being an elitist--in the good sense--about art doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy popular culture. It doesn’t mean you’re a bigot or a bad person. It just means you won’t be satisfied with the average and the ordinary. Why should you? There’s too much good stuff around, if you only know where to find it.