The Next Great Reality Show?

Robin Rice on Visual Art | Bravo's Work of Art: The Next Great Artist

by Robin Rice

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

"Be brave, be competitive and be yourselves. Show the world your art," Sarah Jessica Parker exhorts 14 mostly young and attractive artists early in the première episode of Bravo's latest reality show, Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.

The subject is novel, but it's otherwise a predictable and effective formula packed with pretensions, clichés and suspense, as well as some pretty good — and some really bad — artworks.

The show's judges are recognized experts in criticism, collecting and commerce (one is an NYC gallery owner; another, a senior art critic for New York Magazine), and the contestants all seem to already have a degree of midlevel success at their chosen art specialties. Writer and curator Trong Nguyen, for example, has been reviewed in The New York Times, and painter Jaclyn Santos was a studio assistant to Jeff Koons.

One of the two youngest competitors has a Philadelphia connection. Abdi Farah, 23, is a UPenn grad (check out his cartoons from The Daily Pennsylvanian at abdiart.com) and a recent employee of the Mural Arts Program. It looks like he may do well on Work of Art.

The grand prize is a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, a publicity coup for both museum and artist. On the other hand, considering the expenses involved in making art, the top money prize of $100,000 is surprisingly unimpressive.

Yesterday's challenge: Make a portrait of a fellow contestant. In 13 hours. Early in the show, brusque Nao Bustamante coolly announced her willingness to critique her peers and abrasively solidified her status with them by making good on that promise. Nevertheless, Nao's process diagram of her subject (Miles Mendenhall, who has obsessive compulsive disorder) was more substantive than the judges recognized when they placed her in the bottom three.

"I'm not responsible for your experience of my work," Nao informed them. I hope she's around for a few weeks. She's fun.

The top three works would look fine in any M.F.A. show. Abdi's striking, cartoonish portrait of painter Ryan Shultz was singled out by the judges. Another leading contender was Mark Velasquez's black-and-white photograph of Erik Johnson as a mock-menacing, tattooed biker-type.

Top portraitist: Miles, whose obsessive, compulsive reiteration of the fact that he has OCD eventually produced a lyrical, photo silk-screened "death portrait" of Nao, improvised despite a technical snafu. He earned the win.

The qualities of the remaining contestants, most of whom are realist painters, have yet to emerge. A not-so-subtle bias against the oldest artist, Judith Braun, emerged early and rather surprisingly. At 62 in a pack of under-40s, Judith had the wisdom to be pleased when she was excluded by the other women into the only single bedroom.

We will get to know these people better in coming weeks when the challenges will include assembling art from a collection of junk, decorating automobiles and working collaboratively. But the show can't automatically catapult the eventual winner into art stardom. It cannot guarantee the respect of the art community. A lot depends on whether Work of Art is perceived as a legitimate testing ground or a kitsch debacle. Even ridicule might be a plus for a winner who knows how to exploit it.

So is Work of Art actually a work of art? The show appears to demystify the process of making art, and getting people to enjoy thinking about the field has got to be a good thing. 

Already, judges have floated the suggestion that successful art (like a successful television show) should clearly communicate something specific or should be marketable. This trivializes the potential of art; some of the best art, indeed, is murky and contradictory. The show is not likely to favor artists who are oblique or subtle or conceptual. (Those qualities hurt two of the bottom three this week.)

The structure is ideal for a versatile, facile, clever person, someone who likes to represent people photographically or otherwise. In other words, the kind of artist who would do well in an advertising agency. Entertainment trumps profundity almost always, but the best entertainment has a core of truth.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)