Headline Making Art

My thoughts on tonight's episode of Bravo's Work of Art, with spoilers included.

Simon dragged the contestants out of bed very early in the morning and brought them to the New York Times building. They were shown a giant pile of newspaper sections, and told to pick a headline to base an artwork on. Simple enough. Some artists found headlines that had personal meanings for them, while some seemed like they just chose something at random. The assignment also required that the newspaper be physically part of the piece.

Most went with some kind of 3D work, including a few pieces that formed installations. It's sometimes hard to judge these things on tv, but nothing really impressed me tonight. The judges seemed a little out of touch this week. Finalist Dusty made a giant map of the U.S. out of crumpled newspaper, which included several giant black silhouettes of figures against the standard printed newsprint coloring. The figural silhouettes were pretty obvious, but at least one of the judges took a few minutes to realize they were there. Lola finally managed to be noticed, but her paper sculptures of weapons looked like something thrown together in a few minutes, not like something worthy of the top group. For the second time, top honors went to Young, for his installation about a dissident Chinese artist. It must have been the topic that impressed them, because the art itself was boring. No immunity tonight, but Young will get a $20K cash prize and his work exhibited at the Times building, to go with the two page spread in Entertainment Weekly he got a few weeks ago; even if he doesn't win this whole thing, he's really cleaned up.

While I didn't agree about the judges picks for the top artists, I did agree that the three in the bottom group weren't successful. Sucklord's piece wasn't so much bad as somehow being both too obvious and confusing at the same time. Sarah and Bayete's pieces seemed to have no relationship to the headlines that had inspired them, and were somewhat indecipherable in general. Bayete got the boot, but perhaps it was time. Being strictly a video artist, it seemed that he was often out of his element with some of the challenges. His inability to properly hang doors as part of his installation was one factor that cost him his spot tonight.

Now, my connection. Several years ago I made the above piece, called A New Year For America. One of those ideas that came to me quickly, but took quite a while to execute. This portrait of America includes a representation of a news story from each of the 50 states, plus the District of Columbia and a few national stories, all coming from a few weeks before and after New Year's Day that year. I'm sure that some of the stories came from the NY Times, with USA Today being a good source, and occasionally online versions of newspapers from other states were reviewed to finish up my list. Gathering the stories took a few weeks, but figuring how to depict them and how to fit them into the one composition was more of a challenge. If I had it to do over again, I'd cut a few items differently, but generally I was happy with how it turned out, and it's been a popular piece in whatever gallery it's been hung in. Something this complex would be out of the question for the limited time given in the challenge (1 day + an extra hour the next day), but I could make something quite nice about any one story, which is all that was being asked tonight.