EDITORIAL WALL OF SHAME A MONUMENT TO CITY HALL'S NEGLECT OF COMMUNITY ARTS.

AFTER more than a quarter-century of neglect, the Great Wall has become a great mess.

The mural, which stretches 13 feet high and more than half a mile along the Tujunga Wash, is a pictorial history of Los Angeles and one of the San Fernando Valley's few bona fide landmarks. It's thought to be the largest mural in the world. It's emblematic of a great artistic tradition, perhaps the only artistic tradition for which Los Angeles is famous.

And it's wasting away. Years of sun, smog, flooding and decay have taken their toll.

As has the utter neglect of City Hall which, after sponsoring many of L.A.'s great murals in the 1970s and then before the 1984 Olympics, has made little effort to maintain them.

The Great Wall could also be said to represent the state of the arts and culture in Los Angeles - inadequately financed and poorly cared for.

In a city with a population of 3.6 million, City Hall appropriates a meager $12 million a year for its Cultural Affairs Department. The result is an utter dearth of the sorts of events, exhibits and productions that enlighten communities and bring them together. In a city famous for its entertainment, L.A. is left woefully wanting when it comes to fine arts in the neighborhoods.

Certainly some noble efforts are made in the private sector and at the community level. The small theaters that operate in North Hollywood, for example, are precious oases in an otherwise barren cultural landscape. But lacking consistent support from city leadership, the arts have never been able to take root and develop a steady following among large audiences.

Rather than fund the sort of cultural endeavors that benefit average Angelenos, city leaders have channeled resources into projects that benefited their fellow elites. The $12 million allotted to the CAD each year pale in comparison to the hundreds of millions city leaders are willing to put toward Staples Center, a theater for the Academy Awards, a football stadium and other similar venues that are priced out of reach of the average family.

For City Hall, the focus is invariably on downtown, where it spent a quarter of a million dollars to put on an Andy Warhol retrospective, far away from where most Angelenos actually live. That sum is more than twice the $100,000 the city has committed to restoring the Great Wall, cash that community members can't even touch until they raise twice as much in matching funds.

To hear City Hall officials tell it, spending $100,000 on the city's most prominent art work is some great act of generosity. They note that that sum is double the mural allotment in the city's budget for the next fiscal year.

And that's precisely the point. While city leaders have no problem coming up with millions on subsidies for billionaires, they turn pathetically cheap when it comes to investing in the sort of projects that actually sustain and invigorate communities.

L.A.'s great wall is quickly becoming City Hall's wall of shame.