photo: hw

Entertainment sells. Up until I met Miles Mendenhall last Thursday at Half Gallery’s opening, I was pretty much living in a hole. Of course I knew about Bravo’s Work of Art reality series, and had even given it about thirty minutes of attention on hulu before losing interest. It’s hard to justify my time sitting and watching a reality show about art that’s not actually about art, but more about selling the idea of what art is suppose to be about. The show could easily be read as a ploy needed by broadcast television to shake things up a bit, because who watches television anymore? When I was introduced to Miles, his work, and subsequently all of the events that led to his show at Half Gallery, I couldn’t resist having a chat with him to hear about his take on Work of Art. Continue Reading More »

By now, you’ve probably seen or heard about the super-hyped new reality series Work of Art put out by Bravo TV. I don’t watch TV or follow much on mainstream media, but this got me buzzing with curiosity.  And recently on WNYC (yes, the radio) I heard an interesting and unexpected interview with Sarah Jessica Parker showing this other side of her being an art enthusiast. So that partly explains why she co-produced Work of Art and also why (other than it being a reality show) it has that Sex and the City flavor. When I got the news that they combined reality TV and art together, I was both shocked but excited. How “real” is it?  The pitch is nothing new: competition-driven, opportunity-of-a-lifetime, artists becoming contestants playing this game, and one winner gets to have it all. Sounds a bit silly, but it must take a lot of guts to push yourself out in front of those cameras many hours a day, especially strange if you’re an artist used to working in solitude. Ultimately it is rewarding since the winner gets a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum and cash. After all, the show is made for public broadcast entertainment but how much reality is it really? I guess it’s also up to the individual artists as well. As Jerry Saltz puts it “maybe being sick to one’s stomach comes from whatever it is that drives someone like me to even appear on a reality-TV show at all.” This crazy New York art world is a whole reality in itself and that’s what drives us to be thrilled by it.