Archive: July, 2010
Next Great Artist 8: Significant Form and the Reality of Television
I found a certain irony in Challenge 8. Last week I railed about the triviality of the challenges. I even weighed in on the subject on Jerry Saltz’s New York magazine blog where some of the more interesting discussions about the show take place. This week the Great Minds at BRAVO decided to go with…
Next Great Artist 7: Playing with Lint
I cannot begin to express how much I dislike China Chow. I dislike everything about her and when she turns to the “winner” and says, “You made a true work of art,” I just wanna send her to her room for a permanent time-out. A list-serve friend described episode seven as “a quantum leap down.” …
Next Great Artist 6: Shirts and Skins
In episode 6, a collaborative challenge was custom-designed for drama, an art school equivalent of shirts and skins in gym class. BRAVO producers determined that interpersonal tensions are entertaining in a way that the creation of art is not. In the first five contests, ideas and opinions expressed during production generated accusations of idea theft….
I Got to See the Ponies
I love horses. I always have. I was a typically horse-crazy girl, collecting china figurines, assembling the stable of my dreams on note cards (drawing on one side, statistics on the other), reading everything published by Walter Farley and Marguerite Henry as well as every story featuring a horse I could find. When my Dear…
Next Great Artist 5: Driving Dazed in Audis
I predict that Miles will take home the prize. I thought this might be the case as early as the first challenge and was moderately certain by the second. I will be genuinely surprised at this point if he loses. Miles will win, not because of Simon de Pury’s embarrassing infatuation with him and not…
Next Great Artist 4: Not Much Shock and No Awe At All
Shock takes center stage in this episode of Work of Art—or at least it was supposed to. The celebrity du moment was Andres Serrano whose Piss Christ, a large-scale photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine, sent various members of the religious right and United States Congress into an absolute tizzy in 1989 and remains…
