Hold the Exhibitions! Look What We’ve Got! : LACMA reorganizes a huge gallery into smaller venues in order to better show its own collection of European paintings and sculpture.

Don’t ask J. Patrice Marandel what he’s working on if you’re just talking about exhibitions. “That’s what people always want to know. I tell them I am working on the collection,” says the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s curator of European painting and sculpture.

Mind you, he has nothing against temporary exhibitions. During his tenure at the Detroit Institute of Arts from 1980 to 1993, Marandel collaborated on international traveling shows--including “The Golden Age of Naples, Naples Under the Bourbons (1732-1805),” “Symbolism in Polish Painting (1890-1914)” and “Francois Boucher”--and he will organize exhibitions at LACMA, where he has been on staff for about a year and a half.

It’s just that the museum’s permanent collection tends to be overlooked in the perpetual flurry of events that attract crowds and press attention.

“We’re a bit exhibition crazy,” he says. “The collection is what remains after the exhibitions are gone, and it’s what we are known for in other cities.”

In Los Angeles, “What’s new?” is the operative question. But if Marandel is a bit weary of it, he now has an answer. An ambitious reinstallation project, designed by Bernard Kester, has divided the formerly vast Mr. and Mrs. Edward William Carter Gallery into four smaller rooms, providing a more intimate setting to display the collection of European painting and sculpture in coherent segments.

Playing tour guide, Marandel begins in a square room containing 17th century French paintings, which he deems “one of the finest [collections from the period] in America.”

Among the treasures are “Magdalen With the Smoking Flame” by Georges de La Tour, “Saint Jerome” by Philippe de Champaigne and “Saint Peter Preaching in Jerusalem” by Charles Poerson, all gifts of the Ahmanson Foundation. The paintings are accompanied by a case of Italian bronzes, which reflect the French princely taste of the time.

Next comes a small, jewel-box gallery of English ceramics and European porcelain, which connects the 17th century French gallery to a room of 18th century Italian painting and sculpture.

“We have a group of Venetian paintings that all happen to be rather small, including sketches for ceilings and altarpieces,” Marandel says, pointing out a wall of five works with Canaletto’s “Piazza San Marco Looking South and West” in the middle. “The Canaletto has such a strong perspective that it has to been seen frontally. To show it as a centerpiece is really crucial. Now it is in its proper habitat,” he says.

Strolling into the last and largest of the four new galleries, a long room featuring 18th century French works by artists such as Jean Honore Fragonard, Francois Boucher and Jean-Simeon Chardin, Marandel says he is pleased with the ambience: “The problem with the [former] big gallery is that it was too wide and too low. Now the scale is much better.”

On any given day, more visitors can be found looking at LACMA’s temporary exhibitions than at the permanent collection, but Marandel hopes that Los Angeles’ art audience will develop a growing awareness of the museum’s resources and the effort required to improve them.

“It isn’t easy to make new acquisitions,” he says. “You have to find the objects and raise funds to buy them. You don’t just snap your fingers.”

But the Ahmanson Foundation, which provides funds for acquisitions, has made the museum a “major player” in the European Old Master market, he says. And indeed an astonishing number of the best works in his department are gifts of the foundation.

“I think most people go to museums to see things they can’t afford to have at home. They want to be dazzled,” Marandel says. “The Getty Museum is the best example of that. They do small exhibitions, but most people go there to see the collection. We have more limited means, but we can do just as well in our own way.”

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CLAY DAY: In conjunction with its “52nd Ceramic Annual” exhibition, the longest-running annual ceramic show in the United States, Scripps College is presenting a “Clay Day Festival” today from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m on the campus in Claremont. Activities--to be staged at the Millard Sheets Art Center, at Columbia Avenue and 11th Street--include Afro-Cuban jazz, clay-making projects for children and a ceramic sale. The exhibition, curated by artist Chris Cox and installed in the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery through March 17, will be open today from 1 to 5 p.m.

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BUY, SELL OR HOLD?: “Investment” is a dirty word in the art world. In a market that is subject to flimsy fashions as well as hard economics, collectors are advised to buy what they like, and if the artwork of their choice happens to appreciate in value they should consider themselves lucky.

Richard Polsky, a San Francisco-based dealer, throws this conventional wisdom out the window in “Art Market Guide: Contemporary American Art,” a $19 paperback book that he plans to update annually. Although guides to the art market aren’t exactly rare, Polsky takes the unusually direct approach of naming 40 artists and telling his readers whether to buy, sell or hold onto their work.

Why is he sticking his neck out and risking ridicule, not to mention the wrath of colleagues who are trying to sell works that he thinks are bad investments?

“It’s hard for collectors to get straight talk about the art market,” Polsky said in a telephone interview. “This is an opportunity to get unvarnished information. While the book doesn’t have all the answers, it is an informed opinion.”

He is certain to be criticized by dealers who disagree with his recommendations, but for the record, here’s a sample of Polsky’s advice:

* Edward Ruscha is a “buy.” Although prices for his work skyrocketed out of sight in the late 1980s and then fell precipitously along with the market value of other contemporary art, “Ruscha’s market is ripe for a comeback” because he is a pioneer in the use of language in art who makes unforgettable images.

* Robert Gober is another long-term winner, in Polsky’s view, because his work is “conceptually fascinating” and he’s an “artist of exceptional integrity” who fabricates his own sculpture at far too slow a pace to flood the market.

* David Salle, on the other hand, is a “sell” because he’s an “awkward” painter and “he has consistently performed poorly at auction, even during the boom years.”

* As for Alexander Calder, Richard Diebenkorn, Eric Fischl, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Claes Oldenburg, Sean Scully, Cy Twombly and Tom Wesselmann, the jury is still out.

A book signing for “Art Market Guide” is scheduled for March 16, from 3 to 5 p.m., at Arcana Books on the Arts, 1229 Third Street Promenade, Santa Monica, (310) 458-1499. Information on the book is available from Distributed Art Publishers, (800) 338-BOOK.

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HONORING THEIR OWN: In the latest chapter of one of the art world’s longest playing rituals, the College Art Assn.--a 13,000-member organization that promotes visual arts scholarship and teaching--convened on Feb. 21-24 in Boston. The annual meeting offers a slew of scholarly presentations, artists panels, receptions, a job market and a publishers showcase, but it is also an occasion for peer appreciation.

This year’s awards ceremony--billed as a highlight of a convocation--honored 10 individuals for their contributions to art, art history, education, criticism and conservation.

The distinguished artist award for lifetime achievement went to Mexican photographer Manual Alvarez-Bravo. Video artist Gary Hill was honored for his exhibition “Gary Hill: Seven Video Installations,” which appeared in Los Angeles last year at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Jules D. Prown of Yale University won the distinguished teaching of art history award. Edna Andrade, professor emeritus at Philadelphia College of the Arts, was this year’s recipient of the distinguished teaching of art award.

Four honors went to writers. Arthur Danto, professor of philosophy at Columbia University and art critic for the Nation, won the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Journalism. W.J.T. Mitchell received the award for a distinguished book in art history for “Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation.”

In addition, Henry A. Millon and Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani shared the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Museum Scholarship for “The Renaissance From Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, the Representation of Architecture,” a catalog for an exhibition at the Palazzo-Grassi in Venice. And the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize, presented for the best article by a beginning scholar in the association’s Art Bulletin, was awarded to Ladislav Kesner, curator of Chinese art at Prague’s National Gallery, for “Likeness of No One: (Re)presenting the First Emperor’s Army.”

The award for distinction in scholarship and conservation, jointly sponsored by the association and the National Institute for Conservation, went to Marjorie A. Cohn, a curator of prints at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum.