Car Art Stops Traffic at Laguna Museum : Artistry: Visitors throng to exhibit of classic customized autos and comic-book characters.

LAGUNA BEACH — In the past, Laguna Art Museum has drawn interest with idyllic seascapes, romantic sunsets and sweeping fields of poppies. So, when they drove the 1960 “Beatnik Bandit” bubble-top roadster into the main lobby for a new exhibit, what happened?

Ticket takers were overwhelmed, the cashier sold five times the usual number of catalogues, and motorists on Coast Highway slowed to check out the lustrous paint job of the hot rod in the window.

Sean Nelson, 18, of Huntington Beach, said he’d never been to an art museum before going to the “Kustom Kulture” exhibit of classic customized cars, comic-book characters and the contemporary art they influenced.

“I just have a fascination with cars,” Nelson said, “and there’s good art.” In fact, he liked it so much he returned with two friends and bought a $29.95 catalogue.

Nelson was among more than 17,000-plus visitors who have streamed through the exhibit so far, making it one of the most popular shows in the museum’s 75-year history. Closing Sunday, the unusual exhibit features a motorcycle adorned by Von Dutch, the father of modern pin-striping, Ed (Big Daddy) Roth’s “Beatnik Bandit,” irreverent paintings by contemporary artist Robert Williams, and other works.

As of Thursday, “Kustom Kulture,” had drawn roughly 500 more visitors than the last big crowd-pleaser at the museum, “California Light,” a 1990 Impressionism exhibit.

Enthusiasm for the paean to pop culture evidently wasn’t even dampened by last week’s Laguna fire.

The museum was untouched by the blaze, but closed for 2 1/2 days, as personnel stored for safety, then reinstalled, several “Kustom Kulture” artworks. Nonetheless, visitors returned in force when doors reopened last weekend at the institution, which is devoted to the art of California.

The combination of autos and art help explain the popularity of the show, said museum director Charles Desmarais.

“Cars are popular with parts of the audience that perhaps don’t normally come to the museum,” Desmarais said, “and if you add that to the museum’s loyal audience, you end up with a larger gate.”

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Nostalgia also had something to do with it.

While curators tried above all to show the link between Southern California fine art and its 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s car culture, they clearly stirred memories with such relics as a dashboard pin-striped by the late Von Dutch, fancy, once futuristic vehicles that Roth created, and his drawings of Rat Fink, the vroom-vroom-happy vermin that he popularized through T-shirts, comic books and model car kits.

“This is like stepping back into my past,” said Art Gilewski, a 34-year-old Toronto resident who timed a Southland visit with family members so he could see the exhibit.

Museum shop cashier Gloria Grant said she heard that same sort of remark repeatedly.

At least 10 times a day, Grant said, one of the myriad shoppers who collectively bought about 1,000 catalogues would say “ ‘You don’t know the memories this (exhibit) brings back to me.’ ”

Visitors’ appreciation for nostalgia and flashy cars doesn’t mean that Orange County residents prefer populist culture over intellectually challenging contemporary art, Desmarais said.

“Of course, when we do an exhibit that is more accessible, more people will come,” he said, adding that while the exhibit’s potential to expand the museum’s audience and draw big crowds was assuredly part of its appeal, it wasn’t “the primary reason” to present the show.

The primary reason, he said, is “to examine an important (cultural) element that has impacted the art of Southern California.”

Nationwide, examination of valid artistic trends--not an entrepreneurial plan to boost attendance--remains the chief aim of exhibit organizers at most museums, even in a time of shrinking private and public arts funding, said David Bancroft, museum program specialist for the National Endowment for the Arts.

“Museums are always trying to broaden their audiences,” Bancroft said, “but the nature of exhibition projects” today still put artistic concerns before box office.

Indeed, Seattle’s Center on Contemporary Art and Baltimore’s Marilyn Art Institute, which will play host to the exhibit later this year and next, had art matters, not attendance, foremost in mind when they booked the show.

When weighing the merits of “Kustom Kulture,” “we certainly didn’t discuss (the size of the) crowds” that the exhibit might lure, said Renee Levine, dean of continuing studies at the Marilyn Institute.

Attendance aside, the success of “Kustom Kulture” should be measured by other yardsticks, including media interest and reaction from the art field, Desmarais said.

The show generated three times the media coverage typical for an exhibit at Laguna--from car-magazine photo spreads to a Japanese radio station interview, a museum spokeswoman said.

It also garnered strong response from such art professionals as Walter Hopps, currently director of Houston’s Menil Collection museum.

A seminal force who helped put Los Angeles art on the map with his Ferus Gallery, Hopps wanted to include key “Kustom Kulture” artists in a similar though larger 1984 exhibition he curated at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

“Automobile and Culture,” designed to show the cross-fertilization of cars and art, didn’t include Von Dutch or Roth “in a major way,” however, because of budget constraints, Hopps said.

But these and other men and women deserve recognition in the art establishment, Hopps said, since car culture influenced such prominent “Kustom Kulture” contemporary artists as Robert Irwin and Billy Al Bengston. As youths, both artists tinkered with cars and motorcycles, then transferred the skills, approaches or materials they used in the garage to their fine art.

“Kustom Kulture” has had “a significant impact on the uptown art world,” Hopps said in a recent phone interview from Houston. “An art museum had never acknowledged (car culture’s contribution to) their world. I loved the show.”

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Artists in the exhibit explained its appeal in terms of what it had--and what it didn’t.

Underground comics, part and parcel of custom culture, were represented by such emerging artists as Kristine Kryttre, who spoke about the show’s assets.

“It was very Californian,” she said, “in the choices of the artists it included and this real freewheeling attitude that’s irresistible.”

Williams, whose irreverent, detailed paintings packed with gratuitous sex, violence and hot rods are nationally known, praised the exhibit’s unconventional approach.

“Most art museums have a responsibility to the academic art establishment, the schools and foundations that support them and the society called the art world,” Williams said. “They’re caught between that and enough entertaining stuff to get people in the door. Laguna museum fell way short of pandering to the establishment, and a lot of people were happy. . . . There was a lot of visual entertainment.”

As for reviews, critics generally praised the show, but some faulted it for failing to adequately explore how car culture influenced mainstream art. That criticism is “legitimate,” Desmarais conceded. “Looking back, we can see things we might have done differently.”

Still, “I’d much rather the museum be faulted for a ‘flawed’ show than for a boring one,” Desmarais said. “The fact is that we did something not done before, and the (catalogue) will live on as an important document.”