Arts scene has lost its class

JOYCE KULHAWIK

THE STATE of local television news has gotten so horrible that nothing should surprise us. But how does one explain WBZ-TV's decision to let go of Joyce Kulhawik, its popular, relentlessly energetic, and seemingly ageless arts and entertainment reporter?

Is someone slipping psychedelics into the water coolers within the executive quarters at Channel 4 or CBS? Had her work deteriorated? Was there someone else any better?

No, no, and no.

Let's go back to the 1980s, which may not have been good for much but it was the golden age of Boston television. WCVB-TV, Channel 5, had set the standard for quality TV in the '70s, and with the advent of Natalie Jacobson and Tom Ellis and then Chet Curtis, it had the highest-rated news shows around.

Then in the '80s Channel 4 came on strong, virtually tying WCVB, in part with the concept of an extended family of news personalities - Liz Walker and Jack (Last Man Standing) Williams as anchors, Bruce Schwoegler as meteorologist, Bob Lobel - who was also shown the door by WBZ - as sports anchor, and Kulhawik as arts and entertainment reporter.

Kulhawik was so popular that Channel 5 tried to compete by using two people - the entertainingly cerebral Chuck Kraemer at 6 and the breezier Dixie Whatley at 11. Channel 7 literally searched two continents trying to keep up.

But Kulhawik was the poster child for arts coverage on TV. WBZ even built a public-service campaign around her and the station's commitment to the beat, called "You Gotta Have Arts." Not only did she cover movies and the premiere arts organizations in town, she also paid attention to the smaller companies, something I appreciated even more when I joined her on the Boston Theater Critics Association.

So what happened? In part, the same thing that is happening to newspapers - migration to the Internet. But that's not the whole story. The Globe, for example, replaced the critics who left with high-quality writers.

The television stations not only became bottom liners, they became bottom feeders. As you look at local TV news now - with the exception of New England Cable News - it's local tragedy after celebrity shocker after hurricane after . . . you get the picture. (And NECN's coverage of the arts is hardly noteworthy.)

It's not surprising, then, that the new mantra is "You Don't Gotta Have Arts." Or "You Don't Gotta Have Nothin' of Value." The FCC no longer rewards stations who serve the public interest, or penalizes those who don't, so Kulhawik had to go to make room for more car crashes.

TV news is just following the culture at large. Arts education is disappearing from the schools. The whole concept of art is being attacked by the repressed right and the politically correct left. As Jacques Barzun, author of "From Dawn to Decadence," has predicted, the arts will be supported by increasingly elite audiences.

So maybe you don't gotta have arts. Maybe arts are just a remnant of a vanishing civilization.

But maybe, as Wynton Marsalis once said, there's nothing that separates humans from other animals without it.

Boston's Publick Theatre just mounted an admirable production of Tom Stoppard's "Travesties" - it closed yesterday - in which James Joyce says:

"An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him . . . from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust . . . A minor redistribution of broken pots."

WBZ hasn't said when Kulhawik's last appearance will be, though it's hard to believe that she'll be replaced, or if so by anyone who has an inkling of what the A in A&E stands for. Kulhawik knows what Stoppard/Joyce is talking about. Without her on local news, the rest is dust.

And broken pots.

Ed Siegel, former Globe television and theater critic, is a freelance writer.