The Bravo Network had a new show this season called “Work of Art.” Its format is the same as that of “Top Chef,” and “Project Runway,” and “RuPaul's Drag Race,” for that matter: get a bunch of aspiring cooks / designers / drag queens / artists, throw them in a room, give them a box of crayons and a Taiwanese newspaper, tell them to create something interesting, and then allow a group of “experts” to evaluate the results. (Don't worry if you haven't heard of these “experts” before; you're just asked to assume that they're well-known in their fields. I grew up in the era when Marcus Welby was thought to be a real doctor, so I can go along with the gag.)
Jerry Saltz, one of the “Work of Art” judges, recently wrote an interesting piece in New York about his participation in the show. This evoked a blizzard of commentary from the readership – much of it revolving around two issues:
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Art is much too important to be the subject of a competition.
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Anything created in the context of a reality TV show can't be good art anyway.
(Some readers also thought that, as an art critic, Saltz was also somehow subverting the creative process. Well, subversion of the creative process is just what critics do. I should know.)
Let's take those two big points one at a time.
Competition. This is sort of a condition of life, I think. Artists, like the rest of us, compete all the time – for attention, for an audience, for money. Most artists make little secret of it. Beethoven wrote amazingly awful dreck because he needed money. Philip Dick wrote novel after novel at top speed, also for cash. Andy Warhol did magazine illustrations. The Italian Renaissance painters were intensely aware (and envious) of one another's work and success. Bach and his contemporaries challenged one another to, ahem, organ competitions, and fought and begged for patronage. Picasso said smugly to Gertrude Stein: “I will paint you one apple and it will be as fine as all of Cezanne's apples.”
Sounds like competition to me.
So much for that.
“Low art” isn't “art” at all. This is the root of pretty much every bit of snobbery in the Art World, even back when I was a schoolchild back in Ur of the Chaldees. In “The Red Shoes,” the dictatorial impresario Lermontov famously declares of ballet that “For me, it is a religion.”
Hats off to Monsieur Lermontov, but not everyone subscribes to his religion. Sometimes, dancing is just dancing.
This “low art = no art” fallacy takes many forms. When the Harry Potter books were coming out, people were alternately praising J. K. Rowling for getting kids to read, and worrying loudly that kids weren't reading “the right thing.” What is the right thing to read? “The Joy of Cooking”? “Crime and Punishment”? “Guns & Ammo”?
Another fallacy, more central to this discussion: you can't really produce anything memorable using a “low” medium like comic books, or TV, or graffiti, or reality TV. This is the main point of many of the critics of “Work of Art.” It's a reality show, and nothing good - nothing worthwhile - can come from a reality show.
Nonsense, nonsense. There's beauty and meaning to be found everywhere, loads and loads of it. And artists and cooks and drag queens and designers are working like gangbusters to create something new and worthwhile and unique.
And if it makes money and makes some poor zhlub on a cable show successful for a few minutes: fab-u-lous.
Those who disagree can go read “Crime and Punishment” or “Guns & Ammo,” or build a plinth in the backyard, or do a watercolor of the First Cuckoo of Spring, or whatever it is they consider to be a serious use of their valuable time.
I, in the meantime, will be watching RuPaul.
Because, as Ru says so pithily: Girlfriend, if you don't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?
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