ART / CATHY CURTIS : A World That’s Hard to Reach : It Can Be Difficult to Discover What’s Out There If You’re Not Already Plugged In

During the past few years, virtually every time I’ve chatted with an intelligent, educated person who has some general interest in culture--pop or classical or both--the same sort of thing happens. They ask me what I do, I tell them, and I get a response like one of these:

Variation One: “Cool! So who are your favorite artists? Who? Uh, I don’t think I know what installations are.”

Variation Two: “Oh, how nice. I love paintings. We have some nice ones at home, and they are truly life-brighteners. You don’t have to write about those disgusting things I hear about, do you?”

Variation Three: “Yeah, I like art--Picasso, Dali, M. C. Escher. I don’t think the other stuff is really art. It makes no sense to me. It’s just a big joke, isn’t it?”

There are times when I wonder whether there’s anyone out there (beyond the “art world”) who is genuinely interested in cutting-edge contemporary work, or even willing to learn about it. Yet these conversations have made me realize how hard it is to pick up basic information about it, if you’re not already plugged in.

This dilemma seems unique to art. We live in a world of highly specialized personal interests (just look at any drugstore magazine rack for proof), but some of them are a lot more available and easier to find out about than others.

Consider music. You can cultivate a broad--or even fairly esoteric--taste in music simply by listening to the radio. It costs nothing to acquire this knowledge; you don’t even have to leave your home or car.

By listening regularly, you develop a taste for certain composers or musicians, figure out what albums you want to buy and learn about upcoming concerts. At that point, you may start scanning the papers for concert listings and reviews; friends might lend you their CDs or invite you to come to concerts with them.

But there is nothing quite comparable in art.

There’s no MTV-like “art channel,” and the few public radio art programs not only lack visuals but (more discouragingly) preach to the already converted. (On KCRW-FM, for example, the weekly five-minute restaurant review is wittily informative, while the weekly five-minute art program has an unctuous, I-know-what’s-good-for-you tone.)

There are no places (other than poster shops, which cater to lowest common denominator tastes) to browse through a vast range of contemporary works of art in the same way you can flip through rows of CDs. Art magazines are expensive and speak to a specialist (or moneyed) readership.

General magazines rarely do features on artists, unless they are already famous. They tend to ignore serious up-and-coming figures. (As a result, people outside the art world seem to think everyone in it is a cross between Jeff Koons and Mark Kostabi). Coffee table art books are costly and rarely deal with younger, cutting-edge artists; most other art books are written for insiders.

During the past decade, art was mentioned with unusual frequency in news reports, provoked by the religious right’s various crusades against “dirty art.” But the subject was outrage, not the art itself. The works in question generally were described so vaguely, so abruptly--or with so little comprehension on the writer’s or speaker’s part--that people who hadn’t seen them couldn’t possibly understand the issues they grappled with.

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Like anything else that may eventually become a passion, art demands total immersion and repeated exposure, even in small bursts. (Make that especially in small bursts, since significant contemporary art tends to be intense, concentrated and demanding.)

You need to live with it, pick it up and put it down, tune it in, flip it off, argue with friends about it, daydream about it, let it work on your brain over a period of time. That’s the advantage of stuff that can be broadcast on TV or radio, or invitingly laid out on the pages of a magazine dropped in your mailbox.

And that’s the drawback of museums. Not only do you have to pay admission, but you have to go there. If it isn’t located in a part of town you visit anyway, it becomes a Destination. But if you can’t visualize what’s there and don’t see why it might interest you, why would you go?

The irony is that some of the most arresting art made today--by younger artists ranging from Nicole Eisenman to Mike Kelley--is about ideas not far removed from the ironic treatment of suburban pieties, sexual relations and pop culture verities in some alternative music lyrics.

But if you don’t know the art exists, if you aren’t completely at ease with the idea that art can take forms other than paintings and sculpture, and if you haven’t had practice “reading” contemporary work, you probably aren’t going to see the connection.

You certainly won’t be lured by art listings, which don’t come with photographs and are helpful mostly to people who can recognize artists’ names and art movements. Similarly, art criticism best serves that part of the public already somewhat knowledgeable (and interested!) in art.

Marketing problems aside, however, the best invitation contemporary art museums can offer to potential younger viewers is to address cutting-edge contemporary art in the context of cutting-edge stuff or popular culture-- including subjects a potential audience is already interested in.

Museums have long attempted to broaden their scope, of course, beginning with inaugural director Alfred Barr’s shows of well-designed consumer goods at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But the hard part is figuring out how to be topical, provocative and analytical at the same time.

“Helter Skelter,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles last year, was memorable for the way it did exactly that. The strength of the exhibition was its fresh juxtapositions, which acknowledged that work by older figurative artists known mostly to underground cartoon addicts and work by younger conceptual artists may stem from some of the same underlying influences and attitudes.

“Kustom Kulture,” at the Laguna Art Museum earlier this year, incorporated a similarly inspired idea. Why not look at a phenomenon in which art and “car culture” and adolescent rebellion (and good old American marketing) intersect? Although the artists later to be known as the “light and space” contingent got rather short shrift, the show was fun to look at and attracted a diverse, interested audience. The main disappointment was the catalogue, which offered lots of breathless adulation but precious little cultural and aesthetic analysis.

In a less ambitious vein, “The Contemporary Psychedelic Experience”--at the Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, last spring--took advantage of a retro vogue among Generation X-ers, with recent work by otherwise diverse artists who incorporate aspects of the spacey ‘60s style. Some of the work was strong, some was dreadful; what mattered most was paying attention to a popular phenomenon that has had an impact on both naive and sophisticated art.

Contemporary art shows can only benefit from the fact that art today is based on a wide-open world of things and ideas--gorgeous, disgusting, time-hallowed, brand new, political, personal, grandiose, trivial. Everything is a potential subject for work; what matters is the spin you put on it.

There are so many other ideas waiting for the right curator--perhaps with help from experts in other fields--to make them happen. How does avant-garde fashion relate to art and architecture? How about a show dealing with artists’ interpretations of TV and movie imagery? What artists have dealt with collecting and collectibles in ironic ways? With surf culture and kitschy, ethnographic or ironic views of tropical life?

In a perfect universe, accurate, unintimidating information would sneak into people’s homes or pop up repeatedly in places visited for purely recreational reasons. Proximity can yield curiosity. Familiarity can breed commitment. But you have to start somewhere.