COMMENTARY : Shaking That Second-Rate Arts Image : San Diego County

SAN DIEGO —  Actress Whoopi Goldberg and artists Paul Naton and Kathleen King share a love. They genuinely appreciate San Diego’s rarely appreciated cultural scene.

Naton and King, commenting on the state of the arts in San Diego before the dedication of their 100-by-70-foot mural this month, bemoaned the fact that misguided people keep trying to bring culture to San Diego when culture is already here.

Before taking Broadway by storm in “The Spook Show” and later winning rave reviews for her performance as Celie in “The Color Purple,” Goldberg used San Diego as an artistic proving ground from 1976 to 1981. Now, she is lending her dreadlock image and gravelly voice to a countywide campaign urging San Diegans to kick in something extra for the arts when they pay their property taxes.

“The arts are the heartbeat of a community,” Goldberg says in the campaign slogan. “If you don’t contribute to the Voluntary Fund for the Arts, who will?”

King and Naton, whose 6th Avenue and C Street mural now ranks as the city’s largest, are just the latest to articulate San Diego’s arts riddle: Most residents remain unaware of the city’s top-drawer artists and cultural institutions.

In folk music, it’s virtually impossible to find a better musician and entertainer than San Diego’s Sam Hinton. The same applies to jazz pianist Mike Wofford and alto saxophonist Charles McPherson Jr. In their field, they are tops. Further, San Diego’s jazz scene boasts at least a dozen singers and instrumentalists who can hold their own in any jazz club in the world.

The dance troupe, Three’s Company and Friends, is a first-rank regional dance company that has suffered the fate of a prophet ignored in his own land. Three’s Company earned plaudits on a tour to San Francisco last year. This year, the troupe is returning to the Bay Area and touring to Los Angeles, Las Vegas and New York City.

Yet, each year Three’s Company desperately struggles, surviving hand to mouth in a city where the dance focus is still on big-name companies from out of town. San Diego, America’s sixth-largest city, is plagued by a hazardous small-town attitude: High quality arts are created outside the city limits. The real McCoy can only be imported. Anything local--contemporary dance, classical music or contemporary art--is always a poor relation.

Theater has escaped this trap, but it is the only discipline to do so. It was not so long ago, however, that people wanted to see “professional” theater, they headed north on I-5, caught a plane for New York or waited for a touring musical.

In people’s minds, home-grown theater did not achieve “professional” standards. So how did that situation change?

The change was due to several events. The Old Globe Theatre, the La Jolla Playhouse, the San Diego Repertory Theatre and the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre shifted to professional status--paying actors at least the base union wage.

But being professional was not enough to turn the trick. It was, ironically, the blessing of the New York establishment that opened San Diego residents’ eyes to the quality of the local theater. The Globe received a Tony Award in 1984, and the Huckleberry Finn musical “Big River,” which Des McAnuff tried out at La Jolla

Playhouse, won seven Tonys on Broadway the next year.

Had it not been for the continued beatification by out-of-town “experts,” it’s a good bet that San Diego’s theater would still be, well, you know, local.

Granted, the theater is the most accessible and least abstract of the arts. Yet the standards in other disciplines are just as high or higher. The quality of exhibits at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art and of the musicians in the San Diego Symphony are on an artistic plane with any production conceived by the La Jolla Playhouse.

Still, in a county of 2 million souls, few are aware that the San Diego Symphony, despite its critical lack of a musical director, is filled with first-rate musicians, and the Museum of Contemporary Art is one of the top 10 modern art museums in the country.

San Diego theaters, to their credit, have slaved to get the public’s bottoms into their seats. They know that artistic excellence alone is not enough.

Successful theaters have beat the drums of their publicity machines and spent blood, sweat and years of exertion to cajole, wheedle and seduce a skeptical public into buying tickets.

What does that mean for the other arts disciplines? Some random thoughts:

- When seeking an outside stamp of approval, it is notable that local theaters were lauded for new plays, not for the classics. It was the theaters’ desire to produce new works like “Big River,” “Holy Ghosts,” “Into the Woods” and “The Cocktail Hour”--not Shakespeare--that grabbed the attention of the national media.

- The San Diego Opera has embarked on an artistic rebuilding program. In a turnaround from programming only old chestnuts, the Opera recently committed itself to produce at least one 20th-Century work each season. Without such risky commitments, the art form loses its vitality and becomes moribund.

- The La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art may have the toughest job of developing an audience. In San Diego at least, contemporary art has a bad name and a decided negative public connotation. When the La Jolla Museum moves out of its house next year, it will have a rare opportunity to expand its audience while working in temporary space downtown for two years during the renovation of its facilities.

- The Symphony must pick a musical director--soon--someone who will galvanize the orchestra artistically and who may galvanize the community behind the orchestra to ensure its artistic and financial health.

Among the stream of guest conductors over the past 18 months, the conductor who arguably is the most accomplished musician came from an unexpected quarter.

As a last minute replacement, Soviet conductor Vassili Sinaisky wowed the critics and audiences and drew favorable comments from musicians in February. He brought refreshing insight to Rachmaninoff and displayed a brisk, businesslike rehearsal technique.

Recently transferred from musical exile in Latvia to the directorship of one of Moscow’s two state symphony orchestras, the 41-year-old Sinaisky appears to be an artist on the move.

With a Soviet music director at its artistic helm, the San Diego Symphony would draw international attention. As exciting as this may sound, several practical considerations weigh against it: With only one hearing, it’s unclear whether Sinaisky commands the rest of the repertoire as completely as he understands the Russian oeuvre. Also, is his personality and English for the American musical director’s role of fund-raiser? Could and would he split his time between Moscow and San Diego?

Regardless, the symphony should soon choose one of the capable guest conductors as its music director.

- Large institutions are only part of a city’s cultural scene. A diversity of arts activities, small and large, is the key to a rich cultural life.

It was through working in publicly funded, community-oriented theater programs in San Diego that Whoopi Goldberg supported herself and her daughter.

Now Goldberg is endorsing similar programs that are being funded by the county Public Arts Advisory Council’s Voluntary Fund for the Arts. The money raised for the fund will be distributed to artists and arts organizations through a competitive granting process for imaginative projects that take the arts into communities.

Contributions, which go to artists and not to administer the program, can be sent to PAAC, Voluntary Fund for the Arts, 5555 Overland Ave. MS 0-303, San Diego, CA., 92123.

With the April 10, final filing deadline for property taxes approaching, property owners have already contributed $20,000 to the Voluntary Fund. Yet that money, destined for local arts, is only a fraction of the $6 million in private and public money raised for this year’s Soviet Arts Festival.

The ease with which San Diegans support arts from out of town is frustrating to people like artists King and Naton. Worse, it perpetuates the myth that the local arts are second-rate.