Reality TV: artists as female stereotypes

On all the reality shows remotely connected to art – Bravo’s Project Runway and Work of Art,  So You Think You Can Dance on FOX – the judges are identified by full names, and the artists by first only. Why? The artists are the chicks, an idea reality TV did not invent. June Wayne explored the cute-little-artist theme in a 1973 essay titled Male Artist As Stereotypical Female, unfortunately not online.

I haven’t read it in years and don’t have a copy but remember it as conclusive. When Donald Kuspit claimed in a lecture in Seattle that artists create but need the intelligence of critics to animate that creation, he illustrated Wayne’s point exactly. Critics are male stereotypes, opening the door for the little lady.

Not to pick on Kuspit, but he tends to wade into his own muck and root around as if he’s dining with the queen. Take, for instance, his take on glass in his 1998 tome on Chihuly:

When it is soft, it can be identified as female, and when it is hard, as male.

The opposite, he wrote, is also true:

At the same time, when it is hard it is static, a trait often
traditionally considered female, and when it is soft it is dynamic,
supposedly a male trait.

Kuspit would be fun on Work of Art. When being fed nonsense, I prefer it to be elegant nonsense, like Kuspit’s. With the exception of the only-fleetingly-there Jerry Saltz, Work of Art judges tend to vacant.

They seem to believe that if artists can’t (or won’t) explain their work, that work can’t be valid. It’s the reason Nao Bustamante was axed from the shock-art episode, even though her piece was the only one that came close to shocking AND even though guest artist Andres Serrano tried to save her. (Judges who don’t listen to Serrano on this subject are beyond dim.)

She sat amid her rubble like a demented street person, plucking at herself as judges discussed her. She lost the race because she could not keep so slow a pace. And because she refused to provide cue cards. As Dave Hickey put it:

I don’t care about an artist’s intentions. I care if the work looks like it might have some consequences.

Bustamante had the best line on her reluctance to explain, from the first episode and now a t-shirt available via.

The judges aren’t the real problem with Work of Art. It’s a combination of weak challenges and too many weak artists. Apparently weak artists. Hard to say when given the odd glimpse of their artificially-produced output through a TV screen. Of the artists remaining, Peregrine Honig, Miles Mendenhal and Nicole Nadeau have managed to master the eccentric format. The rest are just puzzling.

Back to Saltz for a second. His running commentary on the show is better than the show, although his foray into art-critic stand-up is worth watching on the screen. There’s the time he told guest artist Will Cotton that he was a girly-man (Only girls draw unicorns in their youths.) Cotton brushed him off with dignity. And there’s the time Saltz dipped into AA for art-crit lingo: “Keep it simple, stupid.”  Yes, he’s flailing about, and his attempts to distance himself from the Work of Art herd don’t always ring true.

Saltz:

No one in the art world calls themselves a “figurative” or “abstract”
painter. They just say they’re an artist or a painter. It was a sign
that the producers didn’t know the art-world lingo.

No one uses the terms figurative or abstract? Saltz needs to tell his wife. She used the offending language in her recent obit on Doug Ohlson:

By the time Mr. Ohlson died on June 29 at 73, after a fall in front of
his loft building on Bond Street in Manhattan, he had fulfilled his
determination with considerable effectiveness, making abstract paintings
that experimented intuitively with the color spectrum regardless of
fashion.

Great obit, but I’ll bet the lead was ruined by some dead-literal editor. When I read it, I did not miss working at a newspaper. Remove the first five words, and the sentence is a winner.

It could be said that Doug Ohlson’s determination to be a painter came out of the blue.

Project Runway opens its eighth season on Thursday night. Its judges are far better than Work of Art‘s, and yet a tedium hangs over the enterprise. Its much-imitated format is now old hat. More importantly, uninspiring contestants in recent years haven’t offered much of a reason to care about them.

That leaves So You Think You Can Dance. Of the judges, Adam Shankman is both likable and savvy. The others are frequently intolerable. Nigel Lythgoe is a self-aggrandizing ass. Mia Michaels has virtues as a choreographer, but as a judge, she’s strictly from the feelings school, specializing in her own. Her praise curdles with emotional excess, and her criticisms are personal attacks.

As the show (slowly, grudgingly) gains legitimacy in the dance community, better choreographers are widening its reach, but what makes this show compelling is the dancers. Although it’s painful to watch them be milked like production-line cows, every week they turn whatever they’re given into gold.

About that production line: Three artists this season have been felled by injuries, including the brilliant Alex Wong, whose injury is serious enough to be career threatening. Each season dancers are asked to do more. Top cows at dairy farms are treated better. (On the link, Wong in a hip hop routine with tWitch. Below, with Allison Holker. Watch to the end and note that final step.)