How Fine Arts Get Finer: Audience

Among the arts conscious, debate rages: Has Orange County become a center of culture? Is it on the verge of being one? If not, what does it need to make the leap into the big leagues?

It’s not New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco. Then again, no other metropolis with similar aspirations is either.

Still, you can’t argue that a place where people can see the Vienna Philharmonic, one of the world’s premier orchestras, the New York City Ballet, on the same echelon in dance, and original plays that go on to snag Pulitzer nominations is a backwater.

Gaps and weaknesses persist. But perhaps the more serious problem is not what transpires on stage, but who sees it: Audiences, specifically the lack thereof.

Most local venues aren’t going broke (although at least one continues to carry a steep deficit); but galleries and auditoriums aren’t as full as they could be.

If Orange County is to edge closer to competing with Manhattan and the like, it needs a top-notch resident dance company, a larger community of visual artists, playwrights, actors and musicians who dig roots and stay put after graduation. It needs more mid-size arts organizations, and more interaction between the county’s ethnic minority artists and its established arts institutions.

Yet without a larger pool of zealous consumers--the sort who are glad to check out an unproven theater troupe, drive extra miles to see work by unfamiliar artists, or stay up late midweek to catch a quartet’s only performance--greater cultural maturity won’t materialize.

So make a resolution to partake this weekend by visiting an open house in downtown Santa Ana’s emerging Artists Village.

Saturday evening, visit the three dozen artists who operate galleries and working studios in the graceful old Santora Building, on North Broadway between 2nd and 3rd streets, which has been the art colony’s nerve center since tenants began moving in about four years ago.

Or the artist-run Orange County Center for Contemporary Art and Ed Giardina Gallery, which stand immediately across Broadway in the Empire Market Building, also a historic edifice.

Most of the work won’t vie with what’s shown at Los Angeles’ cutting-edge galleries. You’ll find clown paintings (that aren’t meant to be cleverly ironic, demonic or self-consciously mocking), sculpture that’s more stodgy interior decor than contemporary art, and just plain dated or poorly executed stuff.

But I’ve also seen expertly crafted works that are as intellectually challenging and emotionally evocative as anything I hope to see on an outing to a mature cultural hub. Showrooms brimming with more traditional work by such well-known Mexican-born painters as Vladimir Cora are usually crowded.

Meanwhile, enjoy live entertainment in the quaint courtyard between the Santora and the Cal State Fullerton Graduate Art Center (still under construction), in front of the funky and relaxed Neutral Grounds coffeehouse.

This weekend, the art colony’s Hunger Artists theater troupe is scheduled to stage street-theater skits.

The year-old Rude Guerrilla Productions, which has just refurbished a store-front in the Empire building, also plans to inaugurate the modest space with Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days.” (The space will normally seat 60, but intricate staging required for the play will cut that to 40.) Saturday’s show starts at 8 p.m.

For eats, Neutral Grounds is great for lattes and sweets, and Trattoria Ciao restaurant, on 3rd near the Santora Building, serves dinner until 10 p.m. Streets bordering the village may be dark and quiet, but there’s plenty of well-lighted parking nearby.

One of the free event’s best surprises is its wide-ranging mix of visitors. I’ve see an array of colors and stripes, little kids and their parents, teens with multiple piercings, and local pols.

Nobody knows if this still-scruffy enclave will become the sort of thriving arts colony its backers envision. But enough’s going on to make a trip invigorating; you won’t find much urban night life like this elsewhere in Orange County. And there’s not a single Gap, Starbucks or mall in sight.

So go--even if you don’t think you like art. Artists from as far away as Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and as close as home, will be there to explain what they do and why.

If nothing else, you’ll have a good cup of joe, feel great that you didn’t repeat the stultifying Saturday-night-movie routine, and witness how a town--indeed, the county seat--tries to revitalize its inner core.