March 30, 1986

People sometimes have problems in living with art, problems that peer pressure makes them reluctant to acknowledge or discuss. Newspaper ''advice'' columns offer help in such matters as love, money, employment, gardening and home repair, but they have overlooked the needs of the artlorn, those who crave support in coping with the emotional demands made on them by painting, sculpture, and more esoteric manifestations. To remedy this lack, a distinguished psychiartrist, Dr. Les Fauves, author of ''Kunst Without Angst,'' has turned his attention to their difficulties in a new column, ''Advice to the Artlorn.'' Dear Dr. Les: Our Labrador retriever, Dada, keeps bringing home paintings, but we don't know where he gets them. In recent months he has dragged into the house a Keith Haring, a Jean-Michel Basquiat, and a canvas by Futura 2000. Our local museum says it is not missing anything, and there is no one else in the neighborhood who would have such stuff. We have tried following him to see where he gets it, but he always manages to give us the slip. Should we encourage him?

''THE religious revival confronting us is . . . primarily a literary tour-de-force'' having ''very little to do with American life as a whole,'' William Phillips, the editor of Partisan Review, wrote in his magazine's 1950 symposium, ''Religion and the Intellectuals.'' It was a rash claim, and not just because the postwar revival ended up reaching well beyond those who had heard of T. S. Eliot. In a religious tradition that has been obsessed with texts ever since the Ten Command-ments, literary tours de force should not be taken lightly. In fact, religion in the West has gone in large measure by the book. This is not just a matter of the Book of Exodus and the Epistle to the Romans, or of St. Thomas Aquinas's ''Summa Theologica'' and John Calvin's ''Institutes of the Christian Religion.'' There are also the lesser texts - the saints' lives and the tracts and the popular theologies that capture a particular place and time and then quietly fade away. It is these above all that enable us to trace our common spiritual life.

Downtown Brooklyn has for decades dreamed of a Manhattan-style office rejuvenation. Recently, with several large developers announcing plans for more than 2.5 million square feet of office and residential space, borough leaders saw those hopes start to come to fruition.

WITH quick precision, President Reagan inserted American armed forces into two complex international problems last week, demonstrating again the measured activism with which he has tried to inch the United States out of its deep, post-Vietnam aversion to using military power in support of foreign policy. But the two moves, against Libya and Nicaragua, were so fleeting, so low in risk for American servicemen and so tangential to the basic conflicts that they also showed the severe restrictions on America's power. It is still not very far to the outer limit of this country's tolerance for military entanglement. Mr. Reagan stepped across that line by sending American troops to Lebanon in 1982 and 1983, but was flexible enough to pull back when the involvement grew protracted, costly and ineffectual. He stayed within the limit with the invasion of Grenada in 1983, where the brevity of the fight and the clear-cut victory satisfied his public's penchant for happy endings. Last week, too, the engagements were brief and painless for the United States, with forces of the Mediterranean Sixth Fleet hitting Libyan missile sites and patrol boats for two days running, and United States Army helicopters ferrying Honduran troops into a border area to counter an incursion by the army units of neighboring Nicaragua. Not a single American was hurt.

THE surge in building sweeping New York is triggering the greatest demand for construction workers in almost two decades, straining the supply of the most highly skilled tradesmen and increasing the labor costs of some new homes, apartments and offices. Interviews with developers, contractors, union leaders and government officials show that the rare coincidence of record governmental construction - the greatest in the city's history - and massive private development of commercial space and apartments has led to a fierce demand for the more highly skilled workers, such as plumbers and those who put in foundations. The biggest surge in new construction jobs in 23 years took place here last year and government officials say the upswing has continued through winter and into this spring. This demand, in turn, has led to the formation of a growing army of blue-collar commuters entering Manhattan from the suburbs, as well as a new class of skilled migrant workers coming in from the South and Middle West to help fill the ranks of those specialties in shortest supply.

IT began early last week with a Sandinista attack on Nicaraguan guerrilla bases in Honduras. It ended four days later with 14 United States Army helicopters, piloted by American soldiers, flying Honduran troops into a border war zone - a major step up in Washington's efforts to protect the rebels. The battle on the Honduran border quickly cut through diplomatic niceties to lay bare the unspoken commitments that underly the Reagan Administration's support for the guerrilla war. American helicopters were flown to within a few miles of the volatile frontier and, diplomats and Honduran analysts said, Honduras was drawn deeper into a conflict it would rather ignore.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev proposed today to meet President Reagan anywhere in Europe ''in the nearest future'' to discuss an end to nuclear testing. In a radio and television speech, Mr. Gorbachev said continued American testing was a ''pointed challenge'' to the Soviet Union. [ In Santa Barbara, Calif., the White House said that a halt of nuclear testing was not in the American interest and that any summit meeting must deal with ''the entire range'' of issues. Page 15. ] Moscow announced a halt of its testing program last July, asking Washington to join in. The Americans refused on the ground that they considered the Russians ahead in the development of nuclear arms and needed tests to improve their own weapons.

FOR many Americans, Ted Turner is a buccaneer entrepreneur, an imaginative egocentric who takes on improbable ventures - and somehow makes them work. It was tall, square-jawed Ted Turner who invented Cable News Network, the nation's pioneer 24-hour cable newscast. And earlier, it was Ted Turner who converted a foundering Atlanta TV station into the nation's first ''superstation'' by beaming its programs via satellite to cable networks around the country. Now the 47-year-old Georgian has plunged into the most daring venture of all: the purchase of the MGM/ UA Entertainment Company for $1.5 billion. It is Mr. Turner's first foray into Hollywood, his first purchase of a piece of the show business establishment. And though Mr. Turner defends the acquisition staunchly - and he may yet prove to be right - many on Wall Street are deeply skeptical about the price he paid and the prospect for profits.

The Justice Department is drafting new procedures that would make it easier for citizens of Poland and other Communist countries to gain asylum in the United States. Reagan Administration officials said the new rules would establish a presumption that aliens fleeing ''totalitarian'' countries had ''a well-founded fear of persecution'' and therefore met the statutory standard for obtaining asylum in this country. Memo on Polish Nationals The procedures, which would make a sharp change in United States policy on asylum, appear to be intended partly to make that policy conform to the Administration's antagonism toward Communist regimes and partly to respond to pressure from Polish-Americans for changes in American policy on asylum. The proposed policy is evident in a confidential memorandum prepared for the signature of Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d. It says: ''Polish nationals who are unwilling to return to Poland due to conditions there and who request or have requested political asylum or refugee status are presumed to be refugees within the meaning'' of the law.

THE sharp decline in the world price of oil is forcing Northville Industries Corporation, the largest independent supplier of home heating oil and other petroleum products on Long Island, to consider closing or sharply scaling down its 5.2-million-barrel tank farm in Riverhead Town, company executives say. The tank farm, the biggest petroleum products storage facility on the Island, could become the site of condominiums instead. But the officials said that the possible closing of the Riverhead facility would have no impact on supplies of home heating oil or other petroleum products. The changing world oil situation and its effect on Northville offers a rare peek into the operations of its owners, the Bernstein family, one of the most influential families on Long Island but a family of which little is known publicly. The family is also in the midst of a major shift of power from the older generation to the younger generation.

PARADISE POSTPONED By John Mortimer. 374 pp. New York: Viking. $17.95. EVER since Virginia Woolf and James Joyce dynamited the conventional English novel, those of us who love the old Victorian-Edwardian form have been looking for a modern-day equivalent. John Mortimer may well have provided one. Yet ''Paradise Postponed'' is by no means a throwback to an earlier period of history (a feat of which Mr. Mortimer, who adapted ''Brideshead Revisited'' for television, would undoubtedly have been capable). The novel is set firmly in late 20th-century Britain, amid episodes ranging from the imposition of postwar rationing to the 1974 coal miners' strike, from the Mandy Rice-Davies scandal in Parliament to the recent antimissile demonstrations on Greenham Common. But the book has an appealingly old-fashioned quality, inherent in the author's solicitous attitude toward plot, character and language. And even the novel's topicality is itself a kind of Victorianism, since by employing history in this way Mr. Mortimer reverts to a theme rarely found since the days of Dickens, Conrad and E. M. Forster: the idea that private experience only gains its full meaning in the context of public experience. In fashioning an appealing novel from this 19th-century idea, Mr. Mortimer evades both the pitfalls of historical pastiche (as practiced, for instance, by John Fowles and A. N. Wilson) and the limitations of much contemporary fiction.

ASSEMBLY Democrats have blamed the state's Department of Insurance and the industry itself for New Jersey's liability-insurance crisis. In a report issued earlier this month, the Democratic leadership proposed a series of legislative remedies to return the industry to a normal footing. ''The blame for this crisis must rest with the State Department of Insurance and the insurance industry,'' the report said. ''Although commercial insurance is deregulated, the Commissioner always maintains the authority to review rates to make sure they are not only not excessive, but also adequate for covering losses. This was not done.''