The chic of the new.

Resnikova writes on theater for NR and reviews dance for The New Criterion.

WHEN AN issue becomes the subject of the lead article in the Sunday New York Times Arts & Leisure section, you can be fairly certain that the purported controversy had long ago been exhaustively dissected and dismissed in the real world. Such was the case with Times cultural reporter Richard Bernstein's September 30 investigation into the current state of experimental art, which posed the question: "Is there an avant-garde at all these days?" and, in typical fence-straddling Times fashion, came up with the less-than-illuminating reply, "Probably yes." (Even the headlines refused to take a stand, the page-one banner firmly stating, "Why the Cutting Edge Has Lost Its Bite," the continuation meekly inquiring, "Has the AvantGarde Lost Its Bite?")

What causes Mr. Bernstein to question the very existence of a contemporary avant-garde seems to have less to do with the art itself than with the fact that those who consider themselves "cultural rebels" accept financial support from the "establishment" and perform at "mainstream" venues. But the canard of the supposed hostility of the middle classes to avant-garde art was laid to rest long ago. Robert Hughes, in his 1981 history of modern art, The Shock of the New, traces the roots of the avant-garde to the change in patronage between the anciens regimes, with their centralization of acceptable taste, and the free-market equivalent in the nineteenth-century French salon, with its "veritable Babel of competing images, styles, and manners," which was made possible by the rise of the European bourgeoisie and capitalist democracy.

Mr. Hughes then goes on to quote Hilton Kramer, in an interview from the TV series based on the book, who debunks the myth of avant-garde artists as "permanent cultural guerrillas making their forays into middle-class strongholds" and points out that the avant-garde and the middle classes actually have functioned more as a family, with the inevitable generational conflicts family life entails. What has changed is the rate at which this art has become accepted by the establishment, to the point where, about twenty years ago, the gap disappeared entirely, and the middle classes so embraced the avant-garde that, in Mr. Hughes's words, "the newness of a work of art was one of the conditions of its acceptability."

The occasion for Mr. Bernstein's lucubrations was the opening of the annual Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which in its eight years of existence has become the premier showcase for experimental performing art. With its opening-night gala, duly covered in the society columns; with its lavish souvenir program book, printed on coated stock and brimming with advertisements from such purveyors of luxe goods and blue-chip services as Giorgio Armani and AT&T, and the name of its principal sponsor, Philip Morris, writ large on the cover, so that an unsuspecting reader might mistake it for a trendily designed annual report; with, indeed, the lead article in the Sunday Times arts section-even the festival's administrators are forced to acknowledge that they have become part of the establishment, though the new director, Liz Thompson, distances herself from the E-word in her statement of purpose by placing it within ironic quotation marks.

As Mr. Bernstein suspected, there is indeed hypocrisy at work here, but it does not lie in the relationship between the avant-garde and the establishment; it lies within the avant-garde establishment itself. If one takes as the Next Wave Festival's primary and essential task the very presentation of avant-garde performing art, then its cancellation of the festival's opening event, Martha Clarke's Endangered Species, after only two weeks of its scheduled five-week run, amounts to a shameful betrayal more damaging to the cause than any inflicted from without.

The cancellation is especially significant in light of Miss Clarke's status as one of the most firmly established members of the theatrical avant-garde. The recipient of numerous grants for individual projects (Endangered Species alone acknowledges support from, among many others, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, and the National Endowment for the Arts), she was recently awarded a MacArthur fellowship. Her earlier pieces-The Garden of Earthly Delights, The Hunger Artists, Vienna: Lusthaus, and Miracolo d'amore--were widely praised in the mainstream press and have toured extensively in the U.S. and Europe.

It is true that Endangered Species was not one of Miss Clarke's best efforts. As ever, she showed herself to be a master at creating arresting images that follow one upon the other with a dreamlike logic and fluidity. The production values were typically impressive, and the performances committed and skillful (apart from some clumsy recitation of the Walt Whitman poems that make up its text). If anything, the piece was overrefined-partly the result of Miss Clarke's method, in which she worries over every detail for months on end; partly the inability of roughly a third of the cast-trained animals, including an elephant-to adjust to any variation in routine, which lent the show a certain rigidity and lack of spontaneity. Intellectually, however, Endangered Species, with its vague implications of endangerment to blacks, women, and Jews, was an insubstantial pageant that melted into thin air.

Nevertheless, it did not deserve so ignominious a demise. And it is indeed dead: this type of theatrical spectacle does not exist apart from its performance, so for all intents and purposes Endangered Species (ironic title!) no longer exists. And it is highly doubtful that a piece this difficult to cast and stage will ever be seen again. Those so quick to raise the secter of censorship from without have effectively censored from within, and for the crassest of reasons: filthy lucre.

The cancellation was, needless to say, in response to less-than-rave reviews and lagging ticket sales. In other words, the festival management acted as would any Broadway producer-worse, actually, since there are plenty of commercial producers who would have had more heart and faith than to give the hook so early to a show from an artist who had so distinguished herself in the past. In fact, in similar situations many Broadway producers have committed further dollars to advertise and promote an offbeat show in which they truly believed, rather than once again simply confirming the power of the critics to determine what shall and shall not be seen upon the New York stage. In light of the cancellation of Endangered Species, the words the Next Wave Festival has chosen to emblazon on the title page of the program book-"TRUTH PASSION FAITH SURVIVAL"--have a particularly hollow ring.