Money Crunch Paints Artists Into Corner

Forget about Crips and skinheads. The next time you’re roller-blading along the Venice boardwalk, keep your eye out for roving bands of Serbo-Croatian mimes and packs of Celtic ceramists.

The competition for artistic grants has become so ruthless that “art gangs” now roam the city, writes Sandra Tsing Loh in the March/April Buzz. “This is not to say that there are actual drive-by shootings involving competing folk-dance troupes--although who’s to say what might happen if the funding crunch grows much worse?”

Loh, a Chinese-German performance artist, traces the crisis to the L.A. art scene’s infatuation with multiculturalism--which replaced the more tolerant internationalism, she says.

“Unlike internationalism, which viewed the world through the rose-colored lens of global brotherhood, multiculturalism was concerned about making sure everyone got a piece of the pie. . . . In the arts, multiculturalism has somehow become prized over all other qualities--over talent, over beauty, over ideas.”

The core villain in Loh’s biting analysis is the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, which controls the $25-million L.A. Endowment arts grant program.

In 1990, Loh writes, this “commissariat” paid $294,999 to a consulting firm to draft a “Cultural Masterplan.” The resulting document, as quoted in the piece, has a Stalinistic ring. And the department wields the manifesto with grim dictatorial resolve, leaving artists in a frantic scramble to prove their multicultural correctness.

Loh has great fun lampooning the questionable judgment of the department and its henchpersons. For example, there was the $5,000 funded to a show presented at a “Melanin conference,” at which the department representative was kicked out by the racist organizers for being the wrong color--in this case, white.

In other cases, the department’s scrutiny can be intense, and grant seekers are eager to jump through hoops. Loh reports that the L.A. Solo Repertory Orchestra, which has a history of supporting African-American and other ethnic composers, had its grant request rejected. The orchestra appealed the rejection, whimpering that it has also presented the work of “Mendelssohn, who has a Jewish heritage.” That plea did not trick the department’s anti-Eurocentric overseers.

Loh, who is self-funded, labels Peter Sellars of L.A. Festival fame the most conspicuous beneficiary of this artistic dole.

But she holds everyone who grovels for handouts responsible for the “cultural separatism” that has resulted.

“Sure,” she writes, “self-funding can be a drag (I still drive a ’73 VW). But then again, if someone else is paying for your work, doesn’t that make him your boss? Isn’t the artist supposed to be a sort of maverick, a guerrilla fighter who hovers on the outskirts of society, independent of it, critiquing it?”

REQUIRED READING

The men’s movement is an easy target. But most men who satirize it pull their punches, perhaps for fear of seeming like brutish and insensitive . . . well, men.

In the March GQ, though, Joe Queenan shows that he is sufficiently secure in his masculinity to give the movement a swift kick where it hurts most.

“The men’s movement is difficult to get a handle on because of the myriad strains of personality disorders that it encompasses,” writes Queenan, who bears more resemblance to the archetypal Average Joe than to Robert Bly’s Iron John--and he’s funnier than either.

“Whereas other groups, say neo-Nazis or guys who like to wear their wife’s panties or risk arbitrageurs, are (screwy) in only one way, the men’s movement is a vast panoply of (screwiness), including alcoholism, drug abuse, spousal abuse, anti-Americanism, old-fashioned misogyny, estrangement from one’s children, hatred of one’s parents, and many other problems common to spoiled, middle-class white people who wish to consolidate their assorted emotional problems into a single addiction: addiction to group therapy.”

After 36 hours at the First International Men’s Conference, Queenan realizes that of the 765 men with whom he has chanted “Hey baba hepwa, hepwa, baba hepwa” (don’t ask what that means), there are only two whom he liked--the only men at the conference “who do not deserve to be hanged.”

* Any Californian or Nevadan who doesn’t worship Lake Tahoe as a natural shrine should be exiled to Nebraska on a morals charge. The problem is, people are loving the place to death. In 1861, Samuel Clemens spoke of his boat rides on this “noble sheet of blue water” as “balloon voyages” because “so empty and airy did all spaces seem below us.”

Now the water’s legendary clarity is diminished, and complex interests struggle over how to best manage the lake. The March National Geographic offers an engaging primer on this Western treasure.

* To infiltrate the campaign of presidential candidate and former Klansman David Duke for the April Details, Penni Crabtree stood before a mirror and practiced spewing racial slurs. She rubbed shoulders with the campaign’s co-tenants, the National Assn. for the Advancement of White People, and listened to campaign volunteers advise on a basic Nazi reading list.

Crabtree doesn’t really come up with much that hasn’t already been said about Duke. Her article is interesting, however, for exposing the banality of racism. In the midst of all the hatred and ignorance, Crabtree comes to see Duke’s rise into mainstream politics “not as an unpleasant aberration, but as a natural and reasonable, if bizarre, result of America’s inability to examine itself.”

SHREDDER FODDER

Ask anyone who watches cable or takes UCLA Extension courses: If there’s one thing Los Angeles in particular and the country in general doesn’t need, it’s the Utne Reader telling people that they too can be creative.

But the March/April issue goes right ahead and does just that with a huge package lamenting America’s supposed societal uptightness while celebrating more artsy-craftsy cultures, like the Balinese, who say: “We have no art--everything we do is art.”

(They presumably got that saying from the hippies who migrated there 25 years ago.)

The best part of the package is the concluding creativity quiz by Jeff Reid. Anyone who answers all the questions right is presumably creative--or may, at least, qualify for some local, state or federal arts grant.

Among the questions::

* “Have you spent hours making up names for your rock band when you don’t even play an instrument?”

* “Even though you haven’t written it down yet, do you have a brilliant movie idea that you could direct if only you knew all that bogus technical stuff?”

* “Do you suspect that you might be more creative if you hired a graphic designer to create a logo for your lifestyle. . . ?”

* “Have you mentally rehearsed your ‘looking back on the early days’ interviews?”

* “Do you think wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt to a Grateful Dead show is more of a radical individual statement than wearing a blue suit to the office?”