Left to right: Jeanne
Greenberg Rohatyn, Jerry Saltz, China Chow, Bill Powers, Simon de Pury
I don’t watch reality shows. I couldn’t even sit through a full episode of “Project Runway,” let alone “American Idol.” So despite my artworld interest, I’m not the target audience for Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, premiering Wednesday on Bravo. I take the roles of artists and art arbiters too seriously to go along with this gimmick:
Fourteen aspiring artists…compete for a solo show at the prestigious
Brooklyn Museum [now squandering some of its “prestige”] and a generous cash prize.
The judges for this competition, as described in the advance publicity, are “art luminaries Bill Powers, a New York gallery owner and literary art contributor;
Jerry Saltz, current art critic for New York Magazine, and Jeanne
Greenberg Rohatyn, esteemed curator and owner of Salon94 gallery. World-renowned art auctioneer Simon de Pury [Yikes, there is a Simon!] adds his voice of experience
as a mentor to the contestants.” China Chow, whose father’s New York restaurant “became a mecca to the art world that ruled Manhattan in the eighties,” is both host and judge. Her chief credential, apparently, is having “fond memories of learning to draw elephants with their family friend,
renowned artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.”
And if that’s not enough, there will be “a new celebrated guest judge every week.” Please tell me that the Brooklyn Museum’s Arnold Lehman will not be among them!
Speaking of celebrated guests, Sarah Jessica Parker, an executive producer of the series, shows up to play mother hen to her art-lings:
Be brave, be competitive and be yourself!
Are you sure Picasso started like this?
If I weren’t already turned off by this trivialization of the art enterprise, the “highlights” (which to me seem more like low points) featured in the publicity trailer would be the nail in the stretcher.
Here are few excerpts:
One artist/aspirant to another: Was there a vibrator in your piece?
De Pury (straight faced): The vibrator changes everything.
Rohatyn (angrily): You give performance art a bad name. [Does it usually have a good name?]
Saltz (cuttingly): I actually don’t think you are an artist. [How many great artists have heard that from the critics?]
Don’t take my word about this. You can watch the trailer yourself, and see if watching judges make artists weep is something you really want to spend discretionary time with. You’ll first have to endure the commercial message that precedes the trailer for the show.
Then you’ll have to endure the trailer: