ART : On-the-Edge Trends Hold Real Value : Off-the-wall art, fashions and restaurants take us out of our normal realm of middle-class expectations and give us some new and rewarding thrills.

On-the-edge contemporary art, restaurants dishing up trendy cuisine and hot designers’ whimsies for home and body--what could these things possibly have in common, other than catering to big budgets?

I’d like to argue that all those things--even experienced at the “pocketbook-safe” distance of a review or an exhibit--take us out of our normal realm of middle-class expectations and give us some new and rewarding thrills.

Maybe you can’t conceive of racking up a king-size bill for dinner in a restaurant that has a weeks-long waiting list and a menu rife with unpronounceable words. You’d likely snort at the prospect of purchasing a small piece of silk for the price of a sports car or furnishing your living room with a chair that looks like a high-tech jungle gym. Possibly you also think contemporary art tends to be too far out, too unconnected with normal daily life, to be worth as much public attention as it gets.

Why, you may wonder, doesn’t the media realize this and stop reviewing restaurants the average person will never visit, running photos of extravagant clothing no one with a 9-to-5 job would ever buy or discussing art that no one would want to reproduce on a calendar?

Granted that most important art, big-ticket restaurant meals and razzmatazz clothing are purchased by a relatively small group of wealthy people. Granted that powerful people eat in hot dining spots, and that the big designers provide important source material for the multibillion-dollar U.S. apparel and furnishing industries.

OK, that’s the way the world works. But the other benefit of the worlds of innovative cuisine, fashion and art is the wealth of imaginative, sensory and, yes, even intellectual pleasure they bring in their wake.

These are the worlds that say, Why not? Why not serve fish with raspberries? Why not wear hot pink with orange? Why not gut the interior of your house and replace it with a minimalist expanse of white walls and sunken seating? Why not imagine you’ve just landed from Mars and look at American culture with fresh, uncomprehending eyes?

We may laugh. We may protest we couldn’t possibly incorporate any of these things into our own lives. But the influence of these worlds does seep in over time, changing the way we look and think. Because these are the worlds that jolt us momentarily out of our boring old habits and rules and preconceptions.

Sometimes, the worlds of art and design coincide in amusing ways. Just the other day I was browsing in a shop and saw a dress printed all over with a pattern of giant colored discs in acid greens and oranges. I smiled at the thought that Neo Geo had been co-opted by the world of design.

Recycled into a garment to be worn by some brave soul, that knock-’em-dead design has returned to its source after having been associated with an art movement that was all about borrowing patterns and colors from common objects. In the ‘80s, young painters looking at stuff as banal as supermarket bar coding and humble fabric patterns were baldly representing them in works of art--in part, as tongue-in-cheek “signs” of the times.

As a group, contemporary artists feel free to “shop” among centuries of art history and decades of objects from everyday life. Personal selections from this huge stock of imagery can be incorporated in whatever schema the artist has in mind. Hierarchies between “high” art and popular art have become virtually meaningless--the style of a common dish towel may be as interesting to an artist as that of an 18th-Century painting.

The important thing is the meaningful connection the artist--and, by extension, the viewer--makes between one thing and another, not whether those things are sufficiently “worthy” to be considered art in the first place.

This approach to art-making comes at the end of a century of rapid-fire change in the art world. It’s truly impossible to conceive of a contemporary movement lasting as long as, say, the Italian High Renaissance (1495-1520). Perhaps as a result of the speeded-up “Information Age” we live in, styles in art have become almost as fickle as season-oriented runway fashion.

To be sure, some people hate to see art equated in any way with fashion. They come to art looking for eternal truths and approaches that have “passed the test of time” or seem likely to endure for centuries to come. But every important artist in history has added something novel to the tradition. Surely it is possible to appreciate artists of the past for their contributions and also to expect new and different things from artists of the present.

The May issue of Art & Antiques magazine boasts a lead article by Patrick Pacheco called “The New Faith in Painting,” which represents a stubborn refusal to face up to the role of novelty in art. The piece consists of interviews with 13 painters--most of them hopelessly mediocre--and a good deal of ranting and railing against the critical popularity of more famous, nontraditional artists of our time.

In his interview, old-timer Leland Bell looks back sadly to the earlier 20th-Century French painter Georges Rouault (“He worked in a little room, on a kitchen table”) and Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian (“He lived in a modest cold-water flat”). These artists were somehow “authentic,” according to Bell, in a way that Jenny Holzer and Jeff Koons are not.

Bell, 68, uses a romantic standard of judgment that applied in the past but doesn’t hold water in the present. In the era dominated by the philosophy of Existentialism, an artist’s work was considered an extension of his life--the means by which he could make a mark on an indifferent universe. It follows that the notion of “authenticity” had meaning to the intelligentsia back then. But nowadays, the intelligentsia believes that we live in a world full of imitations, images that are but copies of copies.

Rouault and Mondrian are still important artists. But if they lived today, it’s a safe bet they would be producing very different works because the intellectual climate has changed. In fact, Mondrian, whose work was big on theory, would probably be a Conceptualist. Even Bell’s schematic-looking figural scenes don’t look like the work of some “master” of the past. Unfortunately, they also don’t have the air of work investigating vital issues of our time.

So, yes, good art is more than fashion, but it is also inevitably a creature of its own moment in history. If our age is restless and novelty-obsessed, it stands to reason that our leading-edge art will reflect this impatience and venturesomeness. Clinging to the past may yield certain comforts, but it means missing out on the spice, the vitality, the kick in the pants that the constant search for novelty adds to life.