Public art is when government officials pay...

Public art is when government officials pay big bucks to someone who erects a twisted pile of rusty I-beams in a park. When the taxpayers get upset, the officials hire me to explain what it means. I’m an art critic. I say the I-beams are really a Rainbow of Harmony or a Convergence of Pacific Rim Trade. Then the officials pay me.

It’s a living.

Community art, though--what’s that? I guess it’s supposed to bubble up from the people or something. No black-tie gallery openings. No fat commissions. Maybe, to get a handle on it, I should attend “The Aesthetics of Community-Based Art Making: a Public Exchange,” presented Thursday through Sunday by the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities.

Thursday’s program from 7:30 to 10 p.m. at the Jodo Shu Betsuin Buddhist Temple, 442 E. 3rd St., includes films and videos by high school students. Friday’s program from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. at Los Angeles City Hall includes excerpts from “Rushing Waters,” a bilingual play produced for the city of Pacoima. Saturday’s program from 6 to 10 p.m. at the Bradbury Building, 304 S. Broadway, features dance by Madres, a troupe of homeless women. Sunday’s program from 12:30 to 4:30 p.m. is a bus tour of alternative art spaces in Central, South-Central and East Los Angeles.

The bus tour is $10. All other events are free. Information: (310) 458-9811. Reservations: (310) 451-6526.

My only worry is that all this might mess up some of my theories--and what’s an art critic without theories? For example, I like to think that some communities are born artsy, some evolve into artsiness and others must have art thrust upon them--if necessary, at gunpoint.

Consider:

* San Francisco: Before all the artists came here, there was the fog. The fog is really all that matters. Without it, there wouldn’t have been coffeehouses, cable cars, the Beats, the Haight. The fog softens the light and blurs harsh realities. It gives foghorns their mournful resonance. In fact, it gives foghorns. The fog maintains the city’s famous cool. It keeps the unhip outside world at a distance.

* Las Vegas: The casinos, of course, are major American folk art, kitsch supreme. But a new sophistication has appeared here. Drivers in some areas see people in ordinary clothes, such as jogging suits, sitting on park benches, waiting for buses. Only they aren’t people. They’re statues. Just the final touch, after a night of clock-free, unreal glitz and the house percentage picking your pocket, to tip you over the edge. A city that can do something this weird has to be reckoned with.

* Sacramento: I’m talking deconstruction here. Critics love that. Bulldoze the Capitol, I say. Its echoes of Greek and Roman civic virtue no longer speak to us. Reassemble the chunks of granite and marble into a giant trough for special interests to feed in.

* Los Angeles: Well, what about it, folks? Which category do we fit in? I’ve always said that art is a transplant here. It has no roots in native soil. But suppose I’m wrong? Suppose a tough, thorny growth of it has been burgeoning away under my nose all this time?

How could I ever explain that?