CULTURE HAS become so eventful in Paris over recent weeks that there

is hardly enough limelight to go round. There was the opening of the new

Pyramid entrance to the Louvre for one. Construction work on the

Bastille Opera is complete and on Friday builders hand over the keys to

director Pierre Berge. The ceremony will be all the more low key as the

opera, due to open on July 13, still has none of the bare necessities --

like an orchestra for example.

The financial black hole represented by the Bastille has thrown

accounts seriously out down the road at the existing opera. Ironically a

technician's strike which wrecked the gala evening there inspired

President Giscard d'Estaing to press ahead with the Bastille. Last month

Europe's leading social glitterati were again deprived of a #300-a-head

gala by a strike or greve as the say here. Une greve? You mean the sort

of thing that happens in public transport? Oui. Quelle horreur!

Industrial relations were again uppermost on Saturday when the corps

de ballet of the opera held a news conference, not the sort of thing a

corps de ballet normally does, to say no-one would be working this week.

They are striking over a Government Bill which aims at imposing

qualifying exams on dance teachers, a sort of Bachelor of Education of

ballet. Opera dancers want the Ministry of Education to let them off

sitting or appraising such exams.

''We don't want to be examined by gym teachers!'' 21-year-old premier

danseur Lionel Delanoe protested and one has to understand. Nevertheless

it seems unfair that serious trouble at the Pompidou Centre, considered

as photogenic in its heyday as any premier danseur, should have been

crowded out of the media by events at the opera. The centre was recently

closed, as thousands of unfortunate tourists discovered, by a strike

which started among security men after lay-offs and spread to all the

staff. The centre employs about 1200 people full-time and 500

part-timers (as against 1200 at the opera) and neither unions nor

management can give a precise figure -- a pretty precise symptom that

all is not well. The good news is, they're back at work. The bad news is

they decided this week on a work-to-rule because none of their demands

has been met.

Since it opened in 1977 the Pompidou Centre designed by a

British-Italian team of architects Piano and Rogers and intended as a

cathedral of culture for the 21st century has become a familiar if still

uncomfortable part of the Paris scenery. President Georges Pompidou who

died in 1974 predicted his project would cause an outcry. Its

multi-coloured pipes, painted according to the function they fulfil in

supplying water, air conditioning or whatever, briefly earned it the

nickname ''the refinery'' though most Parisians just refer to it as

Beaubourg which is the name of the district.

All those pipes are more or less grimy now -- the problem of keeping

the place clean was never really solved. Worse, the centre's very

success has provoked a serious functional crisis on top of which the

staff are complaining that they are underpaid and overworked without

enough money to even begin running the place efficiently.

Making culture available to the largest possible number was part of

the philosophy behind the centre and one which caused a lot of pain to

Paris's artistic establishment more used to reasoning in terms of a

happy few -- them -- than the mass. No-one, however, foresaw how huge

that largest number would get or the distortions it would cause to the

working of the centre.

Designed to accommodate 7000 visitors a day the centre attracts around

25,000, a figure which doubled during Easter weekend. All those people,

nearly eight million a year, make the centre France's most visited site,

way beyond the Eiffel Tower with four million and the Orsay Museum which

is moving up with 3.8 million visitors.

The Pompidou Centre's library is over-run, victim of the quality of

its services and the poor standard of the Sorbonne's libraries --

students prefer Pompidou. On the other hand the contempary music

institute IRCAM run by composer-conductor Pierre Boulez has come under

criticism for being elitist.

Staff complain that former director Jean Maheu was slipshod. They are

unhappier still with their new boss, Helene Ahrweiler, a pal of

President Mitterrand and former Principal of the Sorbonne, whom they say

is both autocratic and inexperienced. You could be forgiven for not

noticing that Paris is European capital of culture this year.