Alternative Spaces Can’t Take Place of Public Forums : Art: A gallery owner makes a case for both traditional and public spaces.

The proliferation of alternative exhibition spaces for art in Los Angeles (covered in “Show and Sell,” Calendar, Sept. 24) is something to be encouraged, and it is important that The Times continue to report even more news on all the interesting art events and phenomenon in our city.

Alternative spaces are especially important in Los Angeles where we don’t have the type of cafe society where artists can easily meet and dialogue, nor is this city like New York where everything is a short distance away.

However, there is something immature and cliched about denigrating the traditional role of art galleries, as certain of the persons interviewed in the “Show and Sell” article were wont to do. Alternative spaces also can easily be viewed as refuges for cliquish and self-righteous groups of frustrated artists, failed gallerists and elite, jaded collectors.

Susan Landau, who lost her Santa Monica gallery and now operates in her West Los Angeles home, admits in the article that large segments of the art-going public “haven’t come to these underground places, because they don’t understand that this is a new way to look at art.”

What is not mentioned in the article is that these alternative spaces, for the most part, don’t advertise their whereabouts or schedules. Most of them maintain quite limited hours, with some open to the public only during openings and on Saturday or Sunday afternoons.

Landau and the others probably would not want the usual gaggle of unpredictable strangers and general public that show up to openings for one reason or another.

Serious galleries have always operated as free and open public spaces. We old-fashioned galleries are there regularly, every day to respond to the silliest comments and affronts from designers, out-of-towners, students, the homeless and the general public.

All of us also provide handicapped access and parking, pay local, state and federal taxes, are subjected to liability insurance requirements, safety inspections by the fire departments, and so forth. Some of us even have on-going public lecture series, provide stipends to emerging artists and have to deal with rapacious landlords, as well as local gangs and their efforts at artistic expression.

And, believe it or not, some gallerists take very little money out of the gallery and endure the sometimes incredible stress simply because they love the art vision, its creators and supporters.

Historically, the role of alternative spaces has been important. Edouard Manet, as a Refuses, paid for his own pavilion when the academy rejected his works for the Salon of 1868. Keith Haring not only used alternative spaces like New York City subway stations but he also exhibited his and the works of his artist friends in a storefront in the East Village, as did numerous important artists during the ‘60s and ‘70s.

However, alternative spaces, like vitamins, are only supplements, not substitutes for broad and democratic public art forums. The well-known snootiness and self-aggrandizing attitudes of the art world, in general, are not countered alternatively by what now appears to be an even further insular drawing in of the wagons.

The alternative to the perceived faults in the gallery system is precisely in the opposite direction--to further expand, promote and engage the public’s awareness of art, and to aggressively and again, publicly, confront the government and corporations’ miserly financial and moral support of culture and the arts in this country.