How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare: The Season Finale of “Work of Art”

It’s a simple formula: three parts soap opera, to two parts game show, add one part narcotic tension, and blend to profit. The result of this alchemy—while perhaps not the transmutation of lead to gold—is nevertheless about as valuable. In this case, however, it’s that of converting life to money (or something resembling life anyway), in a phenomenon we’ve come to know as the reality television show. As an evolution in the process of creating obsessive viewership in exchange for advertiser dollars, the modern reality television show has gone quickly from algae bloom to omnivorous apex predator. The factor responsible is of course the convection oven of personal humiliation and rejection, as opposed to the radar range of otherwise common defeat in a winner-takes-all model—with the result that reality TV can be not merely boring like life, but unpleasant too. For all the bio-engineered sophistication of reality programming, however vaudevillian, producers still rely on what are well-worn and conventional subjects. Whether Top Chef or American Idol, the various topics of these programs by now should be familiar to most. And among them, despite the cannibalization of contestants or the fiendish manipulations of producers, the subjects themselves, whether song, dance, or design, have appeared more or less uninjured for their involvement—that is perhaps—until now.

In what seems a sure step to right this wrong of omission (or is that vice versa) Bravo has concocted a program called Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. It’s like everything else you’ve seen, in which the alternately manically self-deceived, alternately humble contestants (in this case “artists”) are given scraps of themes or just merely scraps, and a clutch of hours within which to do something—something presumably “artistic.” And after all the fuss they are drug before the ubiquitous panel of judges, and on the basis of their good or bad reviews they are elected to proceed, or not.

Granted, on my palate, reality programs dissolve in a tang of vague, and surreal, inhumanity—something like the faint ethical question mark of periodically reaching into a lab rat’s cage and giving it a spin, just for fun. Is it psychological torture, or just good entertainment? It’s here, in this hyperbaric context, purporting to take up the bugbear of artistic process—and what are arguably over-flexible, yet obviously relativistic notions of quality—that the fog of irony becomes so dense, the very notion of such a show takes on the feel of a high-concept Joseph Beuys performance piece, or at least an episodic art school nightmare. In an effort to deflect this sense of the bizarre, and to substantiate its credentials—if not its concept—the show’s makers have enlisted a group of plausible art-types as judges, a group which includes the Pulitzer-nominated art critic, Jerry Saltz. And they have gone the further step of arranging for the show’s winner to receive a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, a moment to be savored while counting out $100,000 in prize money.

For many long-suffering artists, either would be more reward than their entire careers will produce. So, certainly it’s not bad work if you can get it—and don’t have an aversion to the taste of shoe leather. But this disparity alone is innocuous beside what are potentially larger and more troubling concerns the show has placed in high relief. Cautious proponents (such as Jerry Saltz himself) suggest that greater exposure and accessible introduction to the arts are virtues that outweigh potential evils. Practicing artists generally consider the program something of a nose-thumbing exercise aimed at the world of fine art (Ross Bleckner recently referred to it in a piece in The Daily Beast as “a joke—albeit an inside-the-art-world kind of joke”). This seems innocent enough while Work of Art wraps up its first season, but the laughs are sure to be harder to come by if the series rolls on for a longer run, or the slap-dash conceptual rigor of the show begins to seed that very new groundwork of introduction and exposure it claims to seek. 

Being slightly rarefied, the concepts that lie beneath the steamrolling care of a program such as Work of Art will hardly be at the tip of every tongue. The first of these, and it may appear a bit academic, is that of the authenticity of critical response. That is to say there is an essential, and rather triangular, interdependence between the authentic critical response of the viewer, the authenticity of the art object itself, and the authenticity of the context in which that engagement takes place. Think of this as among the reasons that art museums exist in the first place—creating an environment for sober consideration—and inversely, why you’re unlikely to confess your darkest secrets over a plate of Hooters hot wings. The interplay of these relationships form the delicate mechanisms of environment and engagement, tools in themselves, with which we attempt to parse, and are rewarded by, genuine quality when we find it.  

The second, and a concern I imagine to be intimately familiar to practicing artists, is that of the sanctity of the artistic process. And by this I mean the process of piercing alternating veils of hope and despair, fear and pride, failure and perseverance, self-sacrifice and discovery—which lie at the heart of every serious artistic undertaking. Already artists have the flaming hoops of grants and gallerists, finance and circumstance, to hurdle without the entire process devolving into an unambiguous and dispiriting game show. But joy is an innocent sensation, and the price of pleasure is always agreeable where it is paid for elsewhere. Likewise, as an entertaining fiction, surely Work of Art is harmless? Maybe so, but as a show purporting to offer some keyhole of insight into fine art or the artistic processes, it is unmitigated farce. As a work of what Beuys considered “social sculpture” on the other hand—it is a work of brilliant foreboding. 

The season finale of Work of Art: The Next Great Artist airs tonight on Bravo at 9 p.m. CST.  If you don’t subscribe to cable, The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis is running a marathon of the entire season beginning at 2 p.m. culminating with the live broadcast of the finale…and they’re serving free beer and popcorn. If you haven’t been following the show, note that there are two local connections: Judge Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn is the daughter of local gallerist Ronnie Greenberg of Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, and finalist Peregrine Honig hails from Kansas City.

Today’s guest blogger, Hesse Caplinger, is a writer and critic living in Saint Louis.