ART : Questions Remain on Botwinick’s Course for Newport Harbor : But he insists that exhibits will continue to be conceived and planned independently of worries about suitable educational strategies.

In a long interview in The Times Orange County Edition last month, Newport Harbor Art Museum Director Michael Botwinick remarked that his institution was considering some changes in the way it goes about showing contemporary art.

His main goal seemed to be to make the museum more appealing to a broader spectrum of viewers.

“Up until now, our existence has been driven entirely by our exhibition schedule,” he said, “and that has achieved some notable successes in terms of our reputation. The question that we’re asking is: Will a continuation of that as a pure, undiluted approach serve the county as well as it ought to be served?”

Those words suggested that Newport Harbor’s challenging modern and contemporary art exhibition program--which gained national stature under former curator Paul Schimmel--might no longer be the central focus of the museum.

Responding to what he called the “more mature phase” of the now 8-year-old Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, Botwinick also suggested that 30-year-old Newport Harbor’s “role in Southern California and the community may have slightly shifted.”

That remark sounded as though Botwinick feels that Newport Harbor might well be advised to step back from the heat of the contemporary art fray, removing itself from national competition with MOCA and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

I wondered if he meant that Newport Harbor would become a sort of “junior” museum, devoting its major efforts to getting the general public to feel comfortable with contemporary art rather than developing scholarly or groundbreaking exhibits that make news in the art world.

While discussing the problems of showcasing a hypothetical, difficult avant-garde artist, Botwinick noted that such work “requires a certain level of sophistication, a certain comfort level, a certain awareness of other work, to put it in context. Another reality is, it’s meaningless to elementary and high school students.”

Gee, did that mean the museum might start choosing exhibitions based on whether they could be interpreted in suitable educational materials for the under-18 set? What a ghastly thought.

I called Botwinick the other day to get more clarification on these subjects because I intended to make a discussion of them the focus of this column. He insisted that exhibits will continue to be conceived and planned independently of worries about suitable educational strategies.

But I can’t say that I emerged from our hourlong phone conversation with much additional information, other than an increased awareness of Botwinick’s ability to go on at great length about a subject without necessarily committing himself to a clear-cut point of view. There is certainly a substantial stylistic difference in this regard between him and his candid and outspoken predecessor, Kevin Consey, now director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

For several months, Botwinick steadfastly had declined to be interviewed at all, saying (through a museum spokeswoman) that he had no announcements to make regarding the museum’s future. Whenever I would spy him during my museum visits, he would avert his gaze. Then--apparently realizing I had seen him anyway--he would say hello and utter a quick pleasantry before making a hasty exit.

Even when Botwinick finally allotted a good chunk of time for an interview, he proved a hard man to pin down, generally taking refuge--as he did in our subsequent phone conversation--behind bland generalizations that suggested no particular course of action. Granted that the museum’s plans for the future have not yet been formalized, Botwinick nevertheless seemed reluctant to discuss the various possibilities in meaningful detail.

For example, Botwinick denied that Newport Harbor’s new and different position vis-a-vis MOCA meant that it would become a sort of “junior” museum. So what did he mean?

“As MOCA develops its programs, other institutions are certainly less likely to cover the same ground,” he said. He asserted that if, for example, a Newport Harbor curator had been dreaming up a show identical to MOCA’s current “Helter Skelter” (a survey--curated, incidentally, by Schimmel--of brash, in-your-face work by artists from Los Angeles harping on crass or negative aspects of Southern California), such plans would have to be abandoned so as not to cover the same ground.

In reality, however, no two curators are likely to come up with precisely the same exhibit. And when an idea is in the wind, so what if two or more museums come up with similar exhibitions about it?

Botwinick agreed smoothly that increased museum activity in Southern California has created “a far more complex and rich picture.”

So what does MOCA’s new maturity mean in specific terms for Newport Harbor?

Botwinick would only reiterate that the specifics of Newport Harbor’s future have not been determined yet.

Taken in tandem with other remarks he made during the interview, it would seem that Botwinick does have a pretty clear notion of Newport Harbor’s new direction but is loathe to spell it out in so many words until it’s actually implemented. In the meantime, he offers the sort of windy platitudes one expects at a Rotary Club luncheon.

Botwinick did say that he does not “anticipate any significant change” in Newport Harbor’s “sense of direction. I’ve looked through the exhibition schedule for the last 10 years and I’m comfortable that’s the groove we work best in. . . . I think if you look at the schedule five years from now, I don’t think you’d find it any different.”

Well, that’s a relief. But how does that jibe with his preoccupation with the “inaccessibility” of contemporary art and how Orange County audiences might react to it?

On the one hand, Botwinick said, the “job of museums of modern art” is to concern themselves with “the questions being asked today” by artists. On the other hand, he seems frustrated by the notion that some contemporary artists aren’t asking the kind of questions in which a broad group of potential viewers might be interested.

For instance, he noted that Jackie Winsor’s abstract sculptures, currently at the museum, “are amenable only to a very narrow kind of interpretation and contextualization . . . (relating to) the challenges of the material (with which she works). . . . Her work is not about women’s role in history, not about being a Canadian, not about living in a cold climate.”

He asks: “How can we give people to understand that art, if they chose it to be, is a significant point of their lives?” But he seems unwilling to face the fact that contemporary art is unlikely ever to be a “significant” part of the lives of vast numbers of people because--unlike the easy pleasures of Hollywood movies or pop music--it requires a certain level of curiosity and attentiveness that many people are reluctant or unable to supply.

Of course, artists intend their work to be seen and understood by other people. It’s hard to quarrel with Botwinick’s definition of the museum as an intermediary between the artist and the public. That’s what museums are supposed to do.

It does seem to me, however, that it is not possible to be everything to everyone, to expend 100% of one’s energy on all fronts. A museum with a small staff whose leadership is so focused on the mission of educating the general public will have a hard time simultaneously producing the type of exhibition that stimulates and excites people with a special interest in and knowledge of art.

Underneath Botwinick’s homilies and generalities, there seems to be a couple of troubling messages about the true worth of contemporary art and the interpretive abilities of people who do choose to visit the museum.

Frankly, I believe that the primary role of the contemporary art museum is to serve as an advocate of the artist. That doesn’t mean museums aren’t selective. Obviously, their staffs make choices about which artists and work to show, how to “package” this work into exhibitions and how to discuss it in catalogue essays.

But after initial qualitative judgments are made, contemporary art museums really should be like think tanks or “research and development” departments, welcoming even the most abstruse ideas, the most inconvenient or distasteful installations in the name of encouraging the ungainly and unpredictable process that goes under the name of art today.

It’s important to try to teach the general public about this process, and it’s only natural to expect to make lots of “converts.” But you can only lead people to art; you can’t make them drink it in. As an artist acquaintance remarked recently, “I don’t think art creates curiosity. That comes from somewhere else.”

The people who come equipped with natural curiosity, undimmed by conventional expectations, are the museum’s natural constituency. For them, the questions that art poses are matters of everyday personal concern, not a passing distraction.

When Botwinick talks of “enriching” the museum experience “so museums represent positive forces in our lives rather than black holes,” he reiterates concerns that pop up all the time in his conversations. He constantly calls contemporary art “inaccessible” and worries aloud about the “struggle” involved in allowing people to understand it.

Such remarks--and his repeated references to the problem of “selling stuff” to the public--make me wonder whether the three years Botwinick spent in the profit-making branch of visual art (after directing the Brooklyn Museum and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, he was president of an art investment group and senior vice president of a large gallery) haven’t made him too worried about the folks who aren’t “buying” art.

To be sure, American art museums, despite their nonprofit status, have become a good deal more businesslike during the past couple of decades. The old model of the scholarly, tweedy director patiently wooing major collectors largely has given way to a bottom-line-oriented leader with a business degree whose concerns also include such things as museum bookshop sales, restaurant profits and admission fee revenues.

Yet there is still a substantial difference between paying attention to such matters (Consey had to worry about them, too, after all) and setting a tone for the museum that appears counter to its longstanding, implicit purpose: that the main business of the museum is to support the work of worthy artists with exhibition space and scholarship.

So far the museum still is running on programming organized before Botwinick arrived; only time will tell how his views may color the exhibition program. But I do think Botwinick should give a lot more credit to viewers who are engaged by contemporary art. The attentive people who attend the museum’s artist lectures every Tuesday at noon and ask so many thoughtful questions--and others like them--have been part of the museum’s loyal constituency for years.

It couldn’t possibly be worth the effort--a fruitless one at that--to try to rope in anyone who views contemporary art museums as “black holes.” Contemporary art--all good art, in fact--does take some work on the viewer’s part to understand. It’s not a passive experience.

The point isn’t “accessible versus inaccessible” but “are you going to put time into this experience or not?” People willing to do some work on their own will get something out of their museum visits; people looking for ready-made entertainment probably won’t. No amount of sugar-coating, or (in Botwinick’s phrase) “wrestling” the reluctant viewer to the ground with more information, is going to change that.