Just because the most powerful medium on the planet has been used mostly for pleasant time-wasting doesn’t mean it can’t be employed in the service of high art.
A group of accomplished television producers has invented a project for the small screen with highbrow ambitions. Like the chefs, fashion designers and hair stylists before them, the contenders in this new project will do creative battle, but in the arena of fine art.
The result, from the producers of “Top Chef,” is just like every TV reality show you’ve seen, in that it pits competitors against one another in elimination rounds in pursuit of a cash prize. Yet it is unlike any reality TV show you’ve ever seen in terms of the basic challenge.
In “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist,” which debuts at 9 p.m. Wednesday on Bravo, 14 of New York’s art world up- and-comers compete for a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum and $100,000. The players meet one another, and viewers meet them, at an exhibition of their self-portraits, part of the required submissions to enter the competition.
Over the course of 10 challenges, starting with a portrait of one of their competitors, they will variously be validated as artists or sent home, complimented for amazing talents or told their creation doesn’t even deserve to be called art.
The format is entirely familiar. The area of expertise — along with its academic underpinings, history and sanctity — is not.
But why shouldn’t this be the next big hit? It’s “Project Runway” with collages that live on the wall instead of the runway. Art, not rocket science, a window into the soul.
What may surprise unschooled observers is that we can call the outcomes as well as if we were watching the cooking/designing/coiffure shows. We can play judge right along with famous curators, gallery owners, art auctioneers and art critics. And we learn about process, intellectual girding and effective art along the way.
Does this merchandising of the artistic process, this mass-media spectacle somehow infringe on the culivated tastes of art lovers? Does it detract from the elitist, sophisticated aura of the art itself? So what.
The artists, who range in age from 23 to 62 with varying degrees of education and experience in matters of fine art, endure the standard reality-TV drill:
“One of you will win this challenge, and one of you will be going home.” The winner gets immunity from dismissal in the next round.
Like bikini-clad contestants on an island trying to outwit, outplay and outlast, they must outpaint, outsculpt and outconceptualize to stay in the game. (Usually with their clothes on, even when the resulting image is nude.)
In the pilot, self-described art enthusiast Sarah Jessica Parker, one of the show’s producers, makes an appearance to wish the artists luck and daring. Then they get to work telling a story through oil paint, capturing a personality through photographic portraiture, conveying a person conceptually through a replication of his movement around the studio, creating a dark room as a place to develop prints. And more.
Purists will scoff.
Cynics won’t be able to tolerate the idea of high art being subjected to mainstream, mass medium, commercialized scrutiny. For a cash prize! On cable television!
They can grouse to one another about the inanity of turning the artist’s process into a deadline-based televised game.
But the rest of us immediately will be sucked in, learning how professionals evaluate artworks and how artists approach their work and what they feel about the end product.
Mostly we’ll enjoy the images unfolding before us, touring a studio without ever leaving home.
Let the art snobs gripe. Nothing could be better for the continuing health of art and the furtherance of art appreciation than opening up that world to more eyes.
Next, I’ve got a reality TV idea for a show about rocket science. You take a group of scientists and lock them in a lab for 12 weeks with a challenge and a time limit . . .
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
