My Final Thoughts on "Work of Art" (Season 1, anyway)

Karen Rosenberg has already written a well-considered, non-star-struck summary of Bravo's Work of Art, so my initial decision to wait until the show had concluded to weigh in with what I hoped would be a similar fashion now seems somewhat redundant (which is not to suggest I could have done anywhere near as good a job, mind you). So let me just tie up a few loose ends about it all.

Not being much of a TV critic, I won't weigh in much more on the design of the show. To my eye it was classic reality TV competition fare (which means it's about storytelling, not the specific field used as the backdrop, and should probably only be judged as such). The only comment I'll make on how it ended is that the winner did indeed seem to me to be the "most improved" of the contestants, and so I'll offer him my sincere congratulations on winning the contest.

In fact, I'd offer sincere congratulations to all the contestants of the show. Despite what I'd call condescending and sometimes simply moronic challenges, they seemed to take it all (mostly) in stride and often still made interesting work. I will note that I consider asking artists to do such things the height of disrespect for the profession (even as I acknowledge that they freely signed up to do it).

Then there are those affiliated with the program who didn't have "desperate artist seeking any leg in the door" as their defense. This is what I promised to return to in my first post after viewing the show. Here goes...

I'll start at the top: As Tyler put it, Rosenberg "clobbered" the Brooklyn Museum for agreeing to present an exhibition of the winner's work, delivering a brutal blow with this undeniable observation:

The museum’s affiliation with Bravo’s “Work of Art” is most worrying as a symptom of something bigger: a dampening of curatorial vision under the institution’s director, Arnold Lehman. Whether or not you agree with the museum’s efforts to broaden its appeal, which leaves it open to accusations of being overly populist, you have to acknowledge that it has been importing shows of contemporary art much more often than it generates them

Karen more or less echoed my exact sentiments about the oddly chosen artists' champion in the show too:

Simon de Pury, the chairman of Phillips de Pury, was an unexpectedly fabulous “mentor,” doling out bons mots worthy of Tim Gunn from “Project Runway” with a soupçon of Swiss superiority. But the choice of a Phillips representative was peculiar; auction houses in general have long been seen as the enemies of the emerging artist, places where careers flare up and then fizzle.

I interpreted the baffled looks on the faces of the three finalists, when they were told the winner would also have a work of theirs auctioned off at Phillips, to convey "You mean you'll do that to the two of us who lose, right? That's the losers' punishment, right?"

All joking aside, I was appalled at that decision. Putting up at auction the work of an artist with no established market seems cruel to say the least. Maybe the celebrity factor will secure a good price for this one piece, but it will hardly establish a solid sense of value in the minds of anyone taking the artist's career seriously. Indeed, the whole spectacle will hardly be anything more than a prolonged publicity stunt for Phillips, which of course it seems designed to be.

China Chow was a fine host for a reality TV Show. She always looked interesting and delivered her lines (which I suspect some snickering, budding Dostoevsky on the show's staff wrote as his insidious revenge for his heretofore obscurity) with all the enthusiasm they inspired.

From my point of view (which is admittedly insidery), Jerry Saltz got the most out of the show, transcending his uphill battle to inject some standards in the judging (at least as detectable by the edited version aired) via his unforgettable recaps on New York magazine's site. The final summary he wrote was evidence that those who initially hoped the show would do some good for the art world weren't wrong...they were simply expecting it in the wrong arena. Here's a snippet:

In the middle of the street — or, once, in the Dallas airport — I’d be having animated conversations about art and art criticism. That confirmed my suspicion that many people have inner critics dying to get out. But the good I’m thinking of wasn’t about me, and it didn’t happen on the street or even TV. It happened here in these recaps. And not in my summaries of each episode. It happened in the tens of thousands of words that all of you wrote in the comment sections at the bottom of the recaps. An accidental art criticism sprang up, practiced in a new place, in a new way, on a fairly high level. Together we were crumbs and butter of a mysterious madeleine. The delivery mechanism of art criticism seemed to turn itself inside out; instead of one voice speaking to many, there were many voices speaking to one another. Coherently. All these voices became ghosts in criticism’s machine. It was a criticism of unfolding process, not dictums and law - a criticism of intimacy that pulsed with a kind of phosphorescent grandeur.

I still get chills reading that.

As much sh*t as Jerry got for being on the show (not all of it entirely undeserved, imho), I can't think of anyone else who could have transformed his experience there into the incredible online dialog that he did. He's an alchemist with words, that guy, and somehow so damned interesting to watch. Bravo should just give him his own show. Seriously. I'd tune in every week.

There were two other judges rumored to have been on the show, and a few "celebrity" artists (see: "famous accountants") kind enough to lend their credibility to the venture. I kept wishing they'd just hurry up and let Jerry talk again. Mind you, I recognize that my feelings about that are conflicted by the other two judges also being dealers and the dialog that Jerry represents being the one I'm personally most interested in. But then I'm not offering you someone else's take on the show here.

Expectations that the show potentially set for aspiring artists out there about what it takes to "make it" is where I feel it failed the most. In fact, I'd call it all but unforgivable. In particular (and while admittedly, "making it" can have different meanings to different artists), the grad-school mindset that drove the creation (and drama) of the challenges is exactly what an artist hoping to get into the gallery system needs to shake off. The skills it takes to win a TV contest are all but irrelevant in that context. I assume most aspiring artists know that, but just in case some got confused... No one in the gallery system gives a rat's ass what you'd do with a warehouse of broken electronics if you're not compelled to use them as raw material, and we sure as f*ck don't want you purposely setting out to create "shock" art (whatever the hell that means). We are only interested in seeing you make the work you need to make to best express your personal vision. And we want it to be better than excellent. We want it to change the course of human understanding.

In short, focus on that, and forget whether you're too much or not enough of an "art pussy" for this industry. Despite what the show might have suggested, it's not about you...it's about your art.