Season Two of the Bravo reality show gives it another go.
In the reality TV oeuvre, there’s nothing I like better than an interesting competition reality show. Cook something, bake something, make a latex face appliance, and you’ve got me. Tell me one of the contestants is named The Sucklord, and I may never leave my couch for the season.
The Sucklord and other colorfully spelled personalities like Tewz, Jazz-Minh, and Bayeté are just some of the artists that fill out Season Two of Bravo’s artist competition series, Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. Let me tell you, it’s a doozy already.
Competition reality shows are all about pushing expert (or close to it) contestants to show off their gifts doing things that are identifiable yet elevated beyond the realm of everyday abilities. We can watch an episode of Top Chef or Just Desserts and get that while the foods they are whipping up might be exotic or even not our palate’s cup of tea, it’s easy to see they certainly have skills that are amazing if not stellar. With Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, it’s all maddeningly subjective as gallery art is inherently meant to be. One man’s bleeding innards portrait can either be revelatory or just gross. It’s all about how the audience perceives it which in turn makes this show such a delightful mess to watch. How can you judge modern art for the masses? How can you judge the next best thing in contemporary art in a gauche reality show format? The whole show concept might as well be a punch line overheard at a trendy gallery opening in SoHo. Yet, it’s fascinating to watch and get a peek into the minds of these odd, eclectic, creative contestants as they come up with their concepts and execute them according to theme.
The 14 artists meet at the Brooklyn Museum of Art where each has a piece of their art hanging on the walls. As each artist arrives they get to see the competition’s work and then meet one another in the flesh. Aside from The Sucklord and his moniker, other standouts from the start are deaf artist Leon, southern art teacher Dusty, and the nerdy looking Kathryn, who likes to take photos that serial killer Dexter Morgan would adore. About the only thing connecting all of them are their “drama issues” which have obviously molded them into the askew artists we see before us.
In a side gallery, host China Chow and show mentor/art auctioneer Simon de Pury (check out the way Chow purrs his name) usher the assembled group into a room filled with kitsch art replete with dogs playing dominoes, bad landscapes and weird sculptures. Each is given five minutes to select the piece that calls to them so they can then deconstruct the piece in their own style. The Sucklord bonds immediately with a velvet Gandalf the Grey (who wouldn’t?) and the rest scramble to find their match. Lola is the last to commit but she finally settles on a cheesy landscape.
They’re given the majority of a day and then one hour the following morning to complete and install their piece for gallery critique. It’s quite the disparate group with performance art approaches, photography and lots of saws and hammering going on in the roomy, communal loft space allotted to them all.
At the gallery show, Lola, Sara and Michelle are triumphant as the top three. Lola’s dithering ended up turning into a 3D landscape that spoke to the judges, which include Chow, New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz, gallery owner Bill Powers, and guest judge and photographer, Mary Ellen Mark. Sara turned her bound woman sculpture into a watercolor illustration of a similar looking woman on a spit. But the ultimate winner was Michelle, who turned an ugly eagle totem into a beautiful grave marker with a paper skeleton coming from it.
The middle of the pack was excused while the bottom three, The Sucklord, Ugo and Bayet, were hammered by the judges. The Sucklord’s clay version of Gandalf was considered kitsch of the original kitsch. To his credit, he agreed. Bayet’s supposedly edgy reworking of a cheap model head into a racial exploration was considered boring but everyone. But ultimately it was Ugo, the hottie Frenchman that did line drawings that the judges found derivative and he went home.
Was that fair when the cut up cat sculpture made it through? Who knows?! That’s what makes Work of Art so arbitrary yet absorbing. Contemporary artists are enigmas just like their work so even if one doesn’t agree with the judging or the quality of the work, at least the artist mystique is getting a light on it, perhaps bridging the gap between reality TV taste and museum culture just a tiny bit. How can that be bad?
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.