Whose Reality is This?

My thoughts on the most recent episode of Bravo's Work of Art, spoilers included.

As this season goes on, it is becoming more apparent that there are many different games going on here, and the artists, the judges, the producers, and the viewers are rarely on the same page. This week's challenge had the remaining 8 contestants randomly paired, and working on a Street Art challenge. Each pair was given a nice big piece of wall in Brooklyn and the simple instruction to create some street art on it. Thrown into the mix- a $30,000 prize to be split by the winning team.

Dusty and Young spend quite a while hashing out what to do before coming up with the idea of making something about milestones in life related to fathers- one having just lost one, the other having just become one. Kymia and Sara J decided to make something that dealt with both being from immigrant families. Lola and Michelle get the idea to make a series of windows into the building, showing scenes of debauchery. Sarah K and the Sucklord decide to play off the formal quality of the brickwork, and design a complex maze, with simple stick projections coming out from the wall. The judges vote Dusty and Young the winners, which means that Young has won at least a share of all 3 outside prizes that have been available.

Perhaps the biggest problem here is how to define "street art." The most common association is art that has been made in spaces without permission of the owners of those spaces. The common tools are spray paint, stencils, and wheat paste. Of course, the artists were not going to be sent out to illegally deface private or public property (while being filmed, no less), so what we had here was more like public art, which is made with the blessing of the wall's owner. (for example, the mural I'm shown working on above faces the street, but it's no piece of street art) Public art usually has some kind of message and must meet some kind of community standards. Most of the artworks from the show fit this category. The fathers piece met these criteria. It dealt with universal themes (the cycle of life) in a way that was inclusive for almost everyone who walked by it, both thematically (everyone can relate some experience), and literally (space was given for people to write their own feelings on the topic). Some have noted this is not the first time that Young has created (and won with) a piece that involved the audience being invited to write on it. Visually it wasn't particularly sophisticated, and it made no statements that would likely offend anyone.

The Kymia/Sara J piece showed two uprooted tree people, dragged by ropes by an alien (ET) being. The bold oversized figures were either solid black or white with some simple contour lines within, standing out against the red painted wall. It was not clear that the piece was about immigration issues, but it had graphic power, the kind of thing that would look interesting from a block away. The vagueness of the message may be what knocked it down to 2nd place.

The maze piece definitely felt like public art. Too formal to be the product of spontaneous street artists, it felt like the kind of abstract commissioned work that became so popular for public art in the late 20th century. No image means that you likely aren't offending anyone. No risk of offending anyone means not much risk of being interesting to anyone either. The projecting sticks (Sucklord's contribution) added nothing to the experience. It was no surprise that this piece came in last, and the Sucklord was sent home.

The windows piece from Lola and Michelle was a series of views into an imaginary apartment occupied by some kind of animal like beings involved in a wild party and other activities. They also created a bunch of stickers, for the audience to add wherever they wanted. They took it a step further, by encouraging people to put the sometimes obscene stickers on the immigration mural, which got Kymia very upset. The artists said it was all about having fun, but based on their behavior (especially Lola) toward Kymia and Sara over the previous day, this felt mean and ugly. As for the work itself, what we could see of the drawing was poorly executed, and the whole thing lacked any visual appeal or impact. However, of the four murals, it was probably the one that most felt like street art in that no one would commission this for a public space- the only way this gets on a wall is when no one is looking.

Meanwhile, the judges had some very different opinions of what was going on. In his blog, Jerry Saltz says he likes Lola and Michelle's piece the best, though he concedes that it looks terrible from any distance of more than a foot. On camera it certainly looked awful, and that's all I can go by. In his blog, Bill Powers goes so far as to scold Kymia for objecting to Lola's attack on her mural, saying it's all part of street art and she should just deal with it. Perhaps, if this was street art, but it's really a contest with artists making public murals, with $30K (as well as continued participation in the show) riding on a judge's evaluation that hadn't happened yet. Kymia saw it as an act of sabotage and I don't know that she was wrong. The judges all say they expected Sucklord to do better in what they perceive as his specialty, but his medium is action figures and trading cards, not graffiti, and they basically ordered him not to ever use his sci fi vocabulary again. He tried to do something that he thought would appeal to the judges and the higher art world, it didn't, and he was done.

As I watched all this play out I realized that the show is no longer about the goal of being the next great artist. For example, Lola, who hasn't shown much success with her art so far, has positioned herself as the mean girl in this scenario. I suspect that it's part of a plan to become a reality TV star, ready to be cast as a troublemaker on some other reality show. And while the big prize of the Brooklyn Museum show is still a few weeks away, I think that the Sucklord has already won this season. He is no gallery artist and was never going to get that museum show, but he has had several weeks of national exposure to go along with his marketable name and established product line. In the contemporary art world, fame means far more than talent. He will probably have more opportunities than whoever is the ultimate winner of the museum show, and he doesn't have to live among the crazy people anymore.