Source: Culture Monster - Can a television series jump the shark in the first episode? Bravo's new, awkwardly titled reality-contest show "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist," which debuts Wednesday at 11 p.m., doesn't merely argue in the affirmative. The plot also gives new meaning to avant-garde, spinning off its axis before getting to the 10-minute mark.
The crucial moment goes like this. Fourteen artist-contestants were chosen after submitting self-portraits to producers, who include actress Sarah Jessica Parker. In the season opener, the artists are randomly paired off to make portraits of each other. Mostly young and unknown, they face their first challenge in a 10-week competition for the ultimate prize: $100,000, plus a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, the New York art-world's equivalent of an out-of-town tryout.
Series host China Chow stares down the nervous cast, who anxiously await details of how they will be judged on their portrait assignment.
"A successful portrait," Chow proclaims, "is one that shows a viewer the inner essence of your subject, and not just their likeness." The artists collectively gulp.
I did too. Fifty years of marvelous, disruptive paintings and photographs by Alex Katz, Chuck Close, Dan McCleary, Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman, John Sonsini, Rineke Dijkstra and countless other first-rate artists, internationally known and not, and we're still trotting out the wheezing cliche about portraiture's required significance being bound up with the revelation of the sitter's inner essence?
Really? The 17th century lives on.
Equally disturbing: Not a single artist challenges this antique idea. These eager puppies are instead ready to hunker down and try their best to satisfy the demand of their TV patron, visions of Brooklyn dancing in their heads.
A virtual knockoff of "Project Runway," with silk-screens replacing sewing machines and paintbrushes subbing for scissors and straight pins, "Work of Art" shares that hit's production company (Magical Elves, Inc.) But it suffers from comparison to the schmatta show's glory days a few seasons back, when "Project Runway" garnered its own cult-like art-world following.
One reason "P.R." worked so well is that it juxtaposed creativity's yearning for worldly acknowledgment with fashion's magnificent frivolousness, which is central to its appeal. A viewer could watch TV, which has honed frivolousness to its own shiny art form, secure in the knowledge that none of it much mattered, except to the scheming players.
Not so with "Work of Art," which isn't as much bad as merely dull. Bad we could love; dull just sends us wandering off to the fridge, where inner essence consists of leftover meat loaf.
Chow, a model and sometimes actress, plays model and sometimes actress Heidi Klum, the show's combination host and judge. The role of Tim Gunn, kindly father figure and helpful mentor to contestants, is handled by the avuncular Simon de Pury, the Swiss-born auction-house executive.
New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz plays tough-love fashion magazine editor Nina Garcia. (You can practically hear the aspiring artists thinking to themselves: "Don't. Bore. Jerry.") Uptown Manhattan gallerist Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and downtown Manhattan gallerist Bill Powers round out the jury, taking turns evoking opinionated if slightly daffy designer Michael Kors, who knows what he likes when he sees it but can't explain quite why.
Guest-jurors are promised as the season proceeds. The regulars, however, who guide and judge what matters in art as it comes piping hot from the work-room studio, mostly occupy culture's business end. "Work of Art" is based in New York, epicenter of the contemporary art market, and hews close to the trading-house floor.
Episode One is the necessary getting-to-know-you show, both for the audience and the cast. The contestants range in age from 23 to 62, but most are in their 20s and 30s. As personalities, they embody familiar, consumable profiles. There's the slacker, the pretty girl, the geek, the shrew, the neurotic, the late-bloomer, the amateur, the kook, the hipster, etc. Read more at Culture Monster.