Room #627: Christ’s Descent into Hell, Style of Hieronymus Bosch, Netherlandish, 1550-60. (Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

As a mopey tween, I dreamed of following the example of Claudia Kincaid, the protagonist of E.L. Konigsburg’s celebrated children’s book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler: I would hide out in a bathroom stall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until closing, and live in the Met, spending my nights curled beneath a musty duvet in a period bedroom.

I settled, however, for spending sanctioned visiting hours hiding from my homework (and later work work), prowling the Met’s galleries, and discovered a trove of oddities—many featuring nudity, dragons, strange looking baby Jesuses, antiquated racquet sports and other random or lewd motifs that I found, and find, amusing.

Now, in case you mistakenly think that the advent of spring means you should escape to the great outdoors (where you can get grass stains on your pants), I’ve decided to share some of them with you in a “scavenger hunt.” I’ve been told this is a misnomer because a) I am explaining exactly where to locate each object and b) you will not be awarded anything, not even a signed Damien Hirst print, for tracking down all of them.

I counter that even armed with room numbers, which the Met added to its map a year ago, the hunt remains a challenge.

So, good luck, and let the scavenging begin.

Room #544
Figure Personifying a Spring, model probably supplied by Guillaume Dupré, early 17th century, French
This is a purely decorative “gondola” cup, but since I first laid eyes on it, I have coveted it as a soap dish, lead glaze be damned. The mango-size earthenware bowl takes the shape of an allegorical lady (perhaps the nymph of Fontainebleu) in a state of literal undress, reclining in a bathtub. Rather inconveniently, she has a horn of plenty in the tub with her. Also, though otherwise in the buff, she is wearing all of her jewels.

Room #379
Saber With Scabbard, 19th century, Ottoman period, Turkish
This saber was crafted from steel, gold, diamonds, emeralds and pearls for the 1876 investiture of the Ottoman sultan Murad V, who “suffered a nervous breakdown before the ceremony and was subsequently deposed and kept a prisoner until his death in 1904.” Apparently there is such a thing as too many jewels.

Room #745
Living room from the Little House, Wayzata, Minnesota, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1912-14, American
Here, Francis W. Little’s Wayzata abode miraculously boasts views of Central Park’s cherry blossoms, making it a Manhattan real estate dream come true.

Room # 743
Library Table, Herter Brothers, 1882, American
This desk, which once served as the centerpiece of the wildly ornate library of William H. Vanderbilt’s Fifth Avenue mansion, is made of rosewood, walnut and satinwood, and secondarily chestnut, ash, maple, walnut and birch. (Isn’t it amazing how lumber can sound luxurious?) A mother-of-pearl world map on either end of the table reminds Vanderbilt of the scope of his power, while on the desk’s top appears the “celestial field” in the Northern sky the night he was born—because who cares if the world revolves around you if the cosmos doesn’t?

Room #754
Beauty Revealed, Sarah Goodridge, 1828, American
In a wall case filled with precious portraits in miniature, one keepsake stands out: a minute likeness, in watercolor and ivory, of Goodridge’s own breasts (a scandalous take on the “lover’s eye portrait,” which allowed separated sweethearts to peer into an extreme-close-up of one of their beloved’s eyes). The artist made this saucy self-portrait for the amusement of Daniel Webster, then in his first term as U.S. senator. This time of year, I think about Webster almost constantly, because his hay fever was so debilitating it deterred him from a run at the presidency. I like to think my allergies are almost as bad.

Room #610
Saints Peter, Martha, Mary Magdalene, and Leonard, Correggio (Antonio Allegri), ca. 1514-16, Italian
Mostly, I am intrigued by this painting because I formerly did not know that there was a saint named Leonard. A saint named Leonard is about the funniest thing I can imagine. Also, there is a very sleepy dragon on a leash, which is not usually how dragons appear in art. I bet Leonard told the dragon a really boring story.

Room #627
Christ’s Descent into Hell, Style of Hieronymus Bosch, Netherlandish, 1550-60
“The panel was painted during a Bosch revival … when the artist’s fiery scenes of hell were enormously popular throughout Europe,” reads the wall text that accompanies this horrifying panorama. What was going on that Europe’s citizens were hot for fire-and-brimstone scenes of naked people freaking out near hybrid monsters and black pools? Spain going bankrupt four times? Perhaps we are due for another Bosch revival.

Room #402
Red-painted ceramic ossuaries, excavated at Azor, Chalcolithic period, fourth millennium B.C.
These ancient boxes for human bones were designed to look like houses. They also look exactly like the pet carrier my family once used to ferry my cats to the vet.

Room #464
The Monkey King Vali’s Funeral Pyre, from a Ramayana series, ca. 1780, Indian
This work—in ink, opaque watercolor, silver and gold on paper—portrays swarms of monkeys in the aftermath of the overthrow of monkey king Vali, who has recently been deposed by his brother monkey, Sugriva, with the help of the Vishnu avatar Rama. I recently was so engrossed by all the incredible detail in the illustration that I had to be reminded that the museum was closing.

Room #354
Headdress Effigy (Hareiga) Chachet Baining people, late 19th-early 20th century, Papua New Guinea
The 2005 Noah Baumbach movie The Squid and the Whale confirmed what New York’s children already knew: that the Museum of Natural History’s giant squid installation is terrifying. The only thing as haunting to city kids is this awesome 50-foot headdress, made of barkcloth, bamboo, leaves and paint, which incidentally resembles a giant squid. It was once worn for a harvest-rite dance; at the Met it appears to be lurching at you.

Room #909
Ice gun, designer unknown, ca. 1935, American
This yellow gun is included in the exhibition “Highlights of the Modern Design Collection: 1900-2010, Part II,” which closes on July 1, so the race is on to view the L.A.-manufactured enameled and chrome-plated steel device. Its design was inspired by Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, a wall label informs, adding that it “crushed ice cubes with the pull of its spring-driven trigger, shooting ice—instead of death rays—into a glass held beneath it.” In case you thought the ice gun shot death rays. It doesn’t.

Room #217
Chinese Courtyard in the Style of the Ming Dynasty
Brooke Russell Astor’s childhood years in China “inspired” this room, which I’ve only ever wandered into by mistake. It is a perfect sanctuary within the bustle of the museum, constructed in 1980 by 26 Chinese craftsmen (and one chef) who labored for half a year in New York, using tiles made in an 18th-century imperial kiln that was fired up specifically for the task. The best part is that there are live koi fish in a small pond in the corner of the room. Fish in an art museum—at least someone gets to live there!

editorial@observer.com

Not haunting MoMA. (Photo by Martha Holmes//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

This self-inflicted terror was all in the name of science. My aim was to test out the theories of New York-based researchers Kendall J. Eskine, Natalie A. Kacinik and Jesse J. Prinz, who recently published an article in the journal Emotion titled “Stirring Images: Fear, Not Happiness or Arousal, Makes Art More Sublime.”

Their thesis is that when in the throes of a recent scare, one appreciates abstract art more. Specifically, one appreciates in abstraction those sublime qualities outlined by 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke—the rough, the obscure, the terrifying, the powerful, the painful—and not those more sedate aspects of the “beautiful.” For as Burke writes in his 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, “Whatever is qualified to cause terror is a foundation capable of the sublime.”

In their article, Eskine, Kacinik and Prinz state that “recent evidence from neuroscience suggests that emotions play a critical role in art perception,” but that no one had yet looked into which emotional states positively influence aesthetic experiences. To this end, the research team enlisted 85 Brooklyn College students and instructed them (for course credit) to sit normally, do 15 or 30 jumping jacks, or watch a happy or scary video, before viewing the work of Russian artist El Lissitzky.

“Only the fear condition resulted in significantly more positive judgments about the art,” the researchers conclude. At least, I thought as I strolled into MoMA to test this deduction, I won’t have to disgrace myself by doing jumping jacks in front of a magnum opus of modernism. That was back when I still believed I would have the fortitude not to bawl in front of tourists.

Having ditched El Lissitzky, I prepared to alarm myself in the company of Pollock’s vast “drip” masterwork, with its mesmerizing web of enamel paint, which (as anyone who loves a good biopic knows) the artist tossed, flung, splattered, poured, and flicked from above, as he stalked around a canvas laid out on the floor.

Since everyone in a museum now has an iPhone out, snapping photos for their no-doubt comprehensive archives of blurry art-pics, I didn’t look too suspicious as I took up my post with iPhone in hand, Googled “scariest video,” and popped in my headphones.

ParanormalKnowledge.com provided the “top 10 scariest videos on the Internet,” with the tamely titled “Ghost Car” listed first. I hit play, and here’s what I saw: An aerial view of a midsize sedan as it cruises along a winding road. Mellow elevator music plays. Then, A ZOMBIE/DEMON/GHOST POPS OUT AND STARTS SCREAMING.

I let out a strangled yelp and jumped, nearly knocking over a Giacometti, and scaring everyone within a 40-foot radius. (They’ll thank me later when their state of panic enhances their viewing experience, I consoled myself, as the tears began streaming down my cheeks.)

Once I’d mopped my face and my glasses and could kind of see again, I considered the sublimity of what hung before me. My heart was beating at what felt like five times its normal rate; I was hyperaware. My consciousness was working in such frenetic overdrive that the loops of paint suddenly seemed to be vibrating. As the researchers promised in their paper, “Fear seizes one’s attention, halts current plans, and increases vigilance.” (Fact: I almost dropkicked a creepy, pale kid who bumped into me.)

It turns out that when you expect things (killer ghost-zombies) to pop out at you, they (lines of paint) do. Pollock’s calligraphic marks, which on a stress-free day seem calmly to come forward, recede, cohere and then fall apart as you look at them, became considerably more animated. And the claim of unity inherent in the painting’s title, “One,” became even more paradoxical. As I, the startled viewer, attempted to take in the entirety of the work, my heightened attention was whipped from detail to detail.

Without preparatory sketches, Pollock’s “drip” paintings are a record of how man can wrestle with chaos, both letting the paint fall as it will from the stick, turkey-baster, hardened brush or can, and acting as intermediary, controlling the sweep of the action. It’s automatism and Surrealist chance reined in by brute force. Pondering this led me further. This is a Ouija-board style of painting, I decided, where the irrepressible, the otherworldly, is channeled through the hand of man. Could it be that Jackson Pollock was haunting the museum through his artwork?

Pollock’s art is about physical presence, about feeling the body in the room, about feeling the weight of the boot that left its imprint on the canvas. “On the floor I am more at ease,” the painter said of his practice of working from above. “I feel nearer, more a part of the painting since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.” He is literally in the painting, I convinced myself, as I tensely waited for an Ed Harris-like disembodied face to float toward me.

Let’s not forget, my terror-stricken mind churned on, the line from the late MoMA curator Frank O’Hara’s 1956 poem “A Step Away from Them”: “Bunny died, then John Latouche, / then Jackson Pollock. But is the / earth as full as life was full, of them?” Sounds like the earth is full of their ghosts! I hightailed it out of the museum, visions of what kind of ghoul might burst, screaming, from Harold Rosenberg’s “apocalyptic wallpaper” freaking me out me as I fled.

Now, in the un-supernatural safety of my home, I see that things simply got a little too sublime in there. Pollock isn’t haunting me, or MoMA. But that’s not to say that nobody is: Trying to verify my hypothesis that the museum is ghost-ridden, I came across a 2004 blurb in New York magazine that attests, “there is a ghost in the Museum of Modern Art … inherited from the Dorset Hotel, which was knocked down to make way for the museum’s expanded building.”

If being petrified does make us appreciate abstract art more, perhaps every modern art museum should invest in a “woman in white” or two. Still, let’s just say I was more than a little relieved when a MoMA publicist assured me, “There is no paranormal activity in the MoMA building.”

editorial@observer.com

Ed Ruscha, "Brakemen Eat," 2010. (Courtesy the artist and Gagosian)

I don’t really get the West. I find it hard to conjure up an image of a fruited plain or purple mountain that isn’t Hanna Barbera-esque. When I used to play the Oregon Trail computer game, my covered-wagon-mates would all perish before you could say “Donner Party.” I’m the kind of New York snob who, throughout all her out-of-tristate American experiences, keeps up a constant refrain of “Aren’t the people so nice?” and “Aren’t the portions so big?”

So when I found myself at the Denver International Airport, standing between a Starbucks and a tornado shelter, I started panicking.

To understand why I heeded the call of Manifest Destiny in the first place, you need to know that I was in Colorado to see a friend’s play at the deluxe Denver Center. But therein lay the dilemma: Between matinees how was I going to protect myself from the glad-handing natives and their 4,000-calorie meals?

Denver must have some museums, I conceded. I would take from them a crash-course in the culture of the rest of the U.S. Out on the town, at first I rolled my eyes at banners advertising “Art of Winter: An Outdoor Gallery of Ski and Snowboard Art,” as well as at public sculptures of bloated Botero people and Paul Bunyan-size prospectors clutching golden nuggets. However, when I ventured over to the brand-spanking-new Clyfford Still Museum—which still smells like new car—I had a revelation. The museum is compelling enough, a moody, Brutalist space, where you constantly feel like you are retracing your footsteps, reeling round and round past a stream of superficially similar canvases with their colorful jagged abstractions. But as I read some of Still’s curmudgeonly letters—tersely severing ties with his New York gallerist Betty Parsons as he retreated from the art world, etc.—the cloud of guilt descended. They reminded me of my favorite Still quote, from a diatribe on art critics in a 1959 epistle: “They will get no invitation from me to cock their legs like wandering mongrels against that which they can only approach with resentment.”

I headed down the street to the Denver Art Museum. Approaching the entrance to the museum’s cantilevered 2006 Daniel Libeskind addition (a structure as striking outside as it is awkwardly twisty and cramped inside), I encountered Claes Oldenburg’s Big Sweep (2006), a massive dustpan and broom. It was tempting to take it as a metaphor, but I uncocked my leg and resisted. The DAM is not a comprehensive museum, though it strives to be, with small galleries devoted to African, Oceanic, Asian, Pre-Columbian, Spanish Colonial and European art. It has the requisite Calder mobile—aptly titled Snow Flurry—and a Renoir here, a Pissarro there. But it really shines in two areas. The first is in its collection of late-20^th-century art (particularly art of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s). The second is in its vast range of art through the ages that it deems specifically Western.

Now, I was brought up in the Alfred H. Barr school of modern art history, rapped on my knuckles for deviating too far from the vision of modernism the inaugural MoMA director laid out. And yet, at the DAM I found myself compelled by this notion of Western versus Eastern American art, of the use of those geographic distinctions as more than a backhanded way to say that Alexander Phimister Proctor and Frederic Remington’s bucking bronze broncos are goofy.

The DAM boasts an impressive collection of American Indian art, which there has found a far more fitting venue than New York’s Museum of Natural History. Beyond that, the DAM’s Petrie Institute of Western American Art, established in 2001, has brought together a wide, albeit sometimes weird (see: Red Grooms’ Pop Shootout, with a cowboy and Indian gunning each other down, old-timey racist-style) collection of art from the western side of the Mississippi.

The museum also plays host to exhibitions that redefine the West in ways that are fruitful for skeptical goons like me. I just missed a show of Robert Adams photographs, which I have always found draw out the humanity and stark beauty of even the strangest, most devastating aspects of Western expansion: of the rapid, messy development, of the suburban sprawl and the destruction of nature.

I did get to stroll through “Ed Ruscha: On the Road,” an exhibition that traveled from the Hammer in Los Angeles and which showcases work by the artist (a Nebraskan by birth) that excerpts and illustrates passages from Kerouac’s book. On display were pages from a fabulous 2009 Gagosian-Steidl edition of the novel, with text paired with photos courtesy of Ruscha, of beer cans, car parts, cigarette butts, diners, gas stations, crosses, road signs, skimpily dressed broads and jazz musicians.

Also in the gallery were Mr. Ruscha’s signature acrylic-on-canvas text paintings, with their mountain vistas, so similar to the landscape that I could espy through thin panoramic windows in Mr. Libeskind’s building. “Brakemen eat surly meals in diners by the tracks,” reads one 2010 work titled Brakemen Eat. Standing before it, I found myself coming around to the smiling myth of the blessed West, tempered as it is by the surly disappointment that sets in once you run out of land and have to put the brakes on the push to new frontiers.

I was so won over, in fact, that I lingered in a room dubbed the Western Discovery Library, adjacent to the Historic Western American Art galleries. There, among monographs, topical paraphernalia and funny costumes, I picked up a guest book, which asked visitors, “What does the West mean to you?”

The answers read like a parsed Joan Didion essay: “A sense of unlimited possibilities that can only be achieved through great risk”; “To me, the West means old-time America, the days of shoot-em-up bar-fights and horse rides to the mountains”; “I think it is very cool how they survived.”

But it wasn’t until I made it over to the modest Museum of Contemporary Art Denver that I realized that the thrill of the West, of the art it inspires, is alive and well, even as the legacy of Manifest Destiny proves increasingly complex.

In the MCA’s four-year-old David Adjaye-designed building I admired “West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977.” The show presents detritus and documentation from Anna Halprin’s experimental outdoor dances, the Cockettes and the Angels of Light’s extravagant performances at San Francisco’s Palace Theatre, the geodesic domes of Trinidad, Colorado’s Drop City, WomanShare women’s communes of rural southern Oregon, and other defiantly utopian projects.

Here were artists and innovators who engaged with the idea of having been weaned on a pap of possibility that has run dry (or started dispensing only 4,000-calorie servings of deep-fried junk), and who in response sought to colonize new frontiers of experience, of identity. The results are mesmerizing, but not always pretty. Theirs is a freedom that comes with psychosis, liberation that comes with bad psychedelic trips. Their West is still a land where “unlimited possibilities that can only be achieved through great risk.” It’s surly, it’s nice, it’s hopeful, it’s “cool how they survived” (if they survived), it’s wild, it’s wacky, it’s untamed mountains, it’s suburban sprawl. I still don’t get the West, but I’d be a fool not to keep trying.

editorial@observer.com

Spots. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)

In the two years since I became an arts journalist, my interaction with art has been marked by weird flukes, awkward mishaps and, generally, bizarre situations. I conducted an interview with pop-music princess Katy Perry, who had just been painted, nude, on a cotton candy cloud, by Will Cotton; I nervously perched on a $28 million Eileen Gray chair at Christie’s; I almost spooned with Marina Abramović on a giant beanbag in Atlanta.

Throughout, I’ve often had the sneaking suspicion that I’m the wrong woman for the job. After all, I’m a veritable queen of calamity, prone to bumping into priceless objets. And I wondered, as perhaps most of us do, whether I was actually any good at looking at art—I get fidgety staring at anything for more than a few minutes.

My gallery-going style consists of a medium-paced promenade around the room, after which I place non-legally-binding “dibs” on the artwork I like most, figure out where I’d put it in my apartment, and leave. I have watched less than one minute of Andy Warhol’s Empire. (I mean—I know how it ends.) So when it came time to select a topic for the inaugural installation of this column, I quaked in my loafers.

It was time to take a good hard look at things. So off I headed, to re-examine the last art offering I’d breezed through — the 21^st Street outpost of Damien Hirst’s global show of “spot paintings,” fabricated by the British blue-chip artist’s army of 100-plus assistants. (He claims to command 160 employees in his six studios, but he’s got shifty eyes.) My plan was to camp out for half an hour and gaze, without interruption, at a single one of Mr. Hirst’s paintings. I was going to spend 30 minutes in a staring contest with 462 spots.

First, some background, for those of you who have been living in an early version of Newt Gingrich’s proposed moon habitation: The 21^st Street Gagosian Gallery is but one of three New York Gagosian sites hosting “Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings, 1986-2011,” which opened on Jan. 12 at 11 Gagosian locations across the world and in fact has on display only 331 of the 1,500 spot paintings in the catalogue. The works are white canvases, ranging in size from 1 x 1.5 inches to massive, on which grids of variously colored enamel dots—different sizes on different canvases, but consistent within a single canvas—have been applied, with no color repeated within a painting, and the distance between the orbs equaling their diameter.

I have never really wanted to own a Damien Hirst, so my pick-your-favorite game was moot when it came to his spot paintings. As for his other signature artworks: In my apartment, there are already plenty of poorly marked pill bottles and bugs alighting on short-rib leftovers. Moreover, I can’t afford an armed guard to stop baseball bat-wielding dinner guests from smashing a tank filled with formaldehyde.

In fact, I am basically inclined to take offense at this $332 million (according to the British Sunday Times) man, who for his spot paintings borrowed some of the grand concepts of the 1960s’ Minimalism and Conceptualism—most obviously the idea of work reproduced by an array of people from an artist-conceived pattern—and used them for a commercial spectacle that isn’t even that spectacular. (It’s polka dots, remember.)

The spot paintings are like an avant-garde art formula applied to a limited edition Louis Vuitton handbag. (Paging Takashi Murakami.) It’s bad art with good art historical pedigree, with a host of potential predecessors whose movements start with Capital Letters and sound impressive in press releases. The worst part, however—or the best part, depending on your perspective—is that Mr. Hirst is almost certainly pleased by how much this project tees people off.

“I mean, I just move color around on its own. So that’s where the spot paintings came from—to create that structure to do those colors, and do nothing,” the Gagosian press release quotes Mr. Hirst saying. Between the inclusion of the phrase “I mean” and the purported aim to “do nothing,” the gallery seems to be conspiring with Mr. Hirst to present the artist as a petulant bad boy, daring the art world to scold, “Oh, you, up to no good again,” or to defiantly counter, “Actually, there are redeeming qualities to this thoughtless work,” when neither statement applies.

So there I was, in a room with 14 spot paintings from which to choose one for my personal spot challenge. I settled on Phenyltoloxamine (2010-11), which measures 172 x 180 inches and features four-inch spots—which I find the most pleasing, probably because they share, roughly, the dimensions of the top of a large mug. They form a 22 x 21-spot grid; I know this because I spent much of my art-watching adventure counting and recounting them.

The work, I learned after the fact, is titled for an antihistamine—pretty tame stuff for an artist who has proclaimed that his art is about mortality. According to WebMD.com, side effects of this painting include drowsiness (check), dizziness (check), dry mouth/nose/throat (check, check and check), headache (sure), upset stomach (not really) and trouble sleeping (to be determined).

As I took up my station, two security guards gave me the once-over—one threw me the stink-eye right away, the other kept looking at her watch, almost as frequently as I did. “First impressions:” my notebook reads, “gallery v. hot. Wish I could take off jacket. Where could I put jacket? Back pain.” I practiced standing on one foot, then another and, thinking about how bridesmaids sometimes pass out in the apse when they lock their knees for too long, started doing mini-squats. Seeing my mini-squat maneuver, the stink-eye guard began inching toward me.

I tried to look serious and journalistic. Then I thought I’d take a crack at the da Hirsti code: Daniel Barnes recently wrote in his Hirst-Gagosian ARTslant review, “A member of Gagosian staff tells me that the key paintings which correlate specific colours with letters of the alphabet are the start of a game: if you look at each painting carefully, a sequence of colours will reveal a hidden word, and if you get the word first you win a spot painting.”

This is probably baloney, and I don’t trust Mr. Barnes. (How can you trust a man whose website bio states, “He is interested in the consumption, appreciation and understanding of contemporary art, which is underpinned by a theoretical concern to explore the nature of aesthetic experience and interpretation with a view to extrapolate the role of art in contemporary society?”) But I briefly pretended that I was a code-breaking card-carrying Mensa member who makes short work of the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle.

No codes were cracked.

When I saw someone checking out the side edges of the canvas—a classic snobby art-viewing move—I followed suit. The sides are (no surprise here) white. At my sudden lunge forward, however, the cagey guard jogged over and parked himself between me and the painting for a few minutes before reluctantly moseying away.

Next I worried about why certain spots looked the same color to me. “Am I partially color blind?” asks a frantic scrawl in my notebook, with 22 minutes left on the clock. I hunted for the darkest dot, the lightest dot. Wished I had Chapstick. Tried not to look at the neighboring spot paintings, which suddenly seemed more appealing than the one I had chosen.

I then realized, abruptly, that I’d been standing in one place for 15 minutes. So I backed away from Phenyltoloxamine, until I reached the opposite wall. (It is a staple of connoisseurship to change your perspective on the work.) The spots seemed imperfect and blurry from this distance. “Imperfect and blurry,” I studiously wrote in my notebook, followed by, “Get glasses prescription updated?”

I eavesdropped on fellow viewers: “There’s a sociopathic thing going on here,” drawled a woman. “No, it’s genius,” replied a man. “But you don’t have to be a misogynist to be a genius,” said the woman. Had I wandered into a Don DeLillo novel?

Making my way right up to the surface of the painting, I noticed wavy gesso brushstrokes on the canvas, little ripples and ridges you can see through the perfectly smooth enamel. Before I could invent a profound meaning for the messy gesso job, I realized that I was pointing my uncapped pen at the painting, and that my pal, Mr. Hyper-Attentive Guard, was literally holding his breath. I lifted my pen over my head and eased away from the art, feeling a surge of sympathy for Tony Shafrazi, when he’s in any museum.

Ten seconds to go, and on the verge of belting out “Auld Lang Syne,” I stopped to ponder what I had learned: Only that Damien Hirst’s spot paintings give up very little. I recently visited the Metropolitan Museum’s new American Wing and stood transfixed before detail-rich paintings of bobble-headed children. But I don’t want to have a blind spot for art that begs to be disliked. I recalled the New Year’s Eve scene in When Harry Met Sally. “The first time we met we hated each other,” says Harry. “The second time we met, you didn’t even remember me,” counters Sally. Could I pick Phenyltoloxamine out of a lineup? Doubtful. But maybe if I suffered through a little more spite, back pain and security-guard belligerence, I might find some polka-dot love. I reset my stopwatch. Another few minutes couldn’t hurt.

editorial@observer.com

Young Sun, Kymmia, Sara (Photo courtesy of Heidi Gutman/Bravo)

After spending the holiday season absentmindedly spilling eggnog on ourselves as we brooded over how we might pay apt tribute to the now completed second season of Bravo’s reality seminar on the state of the art world, we recalled our school days, and specifically the “lecture poems” we would occasionally compose. One penned such a poem by scribbling snippets of a professor’s biweekly homily in one’s notebook, and then, without changing the order of any of Professor So-and-So’s comments, excising words until what remained was well-wrought verse, rife with the feeling of the lesson, if not its drier facts.

Eureka! We could write a kind of ode, cobbled together from the pithiest lines of our many notes and articles on Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, evoking the season’s high points, and drawing together its major theses on contemporary art before bidding it a final adieu.

Before we leap into our lyrical list of aphorisms, however, here is a précis of the drier facts of the finale: Contestant Kymia Nawabi was crowned Next Great and was rewarded to the tune of $100,000 courtesy of Fiat, a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum, and a cover story in Blue Canvas magazine, as well as the promise that one of her works would be auctioned off by Phillips de Pury & Company. Young Sun Han was dubbed the runner-up (a.k.a. “Next Pretty Good Artist”), while Sara Jimenez was bestowed the title of second runner-up (“The Other Artist Who Was on That Show”).

Now then, let us unzip our Trapper Keeper labeled Work of Art: The Next Great Artist and draw our Day-Glo highlighter across the most trenchant observations we recorded over the course of Bravo’s semester, in the hopes that they will lead us to an understanding of the art world and of Work of Art’s role within it.

Work Of Art:
An Exegesis In
Free Verse

Artists are to be judged by a displeased-looking journalist, an auctioneer with a European accent, a tall-haired gallerist and a rich, confused-looking socialite (x 100 = art world).

Most good-to-great artists have lost their fathers, some to horrific jet-skiing accidents.

A successful contemporary artist can be derivative, but shouldn’t be so derivative that even the socialite art-world arbiters can identify who is being ripped off.

Bravo’s show may just be an attempt to remake the violence of MFA programs, but with more poop.

Nobody in the art world knows what “Pop Art” is, except perhaps for Rob Pruitt.

Kids are cute.

Some artists are friends with
Al Pacino.

Art inspired by some of the most socially and politically contentious issues that confront us is not necessarily good art.

These days street art is mostly made over the course of many daytime hours, in full view of joggers and the police.

It may or may not be a self-fulfilling prophecy for an artist to call himself the Sucklord.

(It is.)

As it has been since the days of the Medicis, great art is sponsored by patrons looking to hang their logos alongside anything avant-garde.

In the art world, selling out means selling T-shirts.

People like art with boobs in it.

People like boobs.

They don’t let you into the Great Artist Canon until you’ve turned a sardonic, haughty or at least clinically anthropological gaze on a few out-of-towners.

When artists have three months instead of three hours to make work, they do a better job.

Bill Powers gets two Pantone shades tanner each week.

China Chow’s hair gets two inches longer each week.

Simon de Pury has learned to drive not just one, but two Fiat cars.

Jerry Saltz wears Spanx on TV.

There’s so much crying on Bravo.

But what is the sum of this Rules of Civility-style guide to understanding (and then dominating) the art world, as defined by Bravo, the George Washington of reality television? Let us look to the three final contestants to see what they took away from their stint living in a reality delineated by these tenets.

Second runner-up Sara Jimenez is now earning an MFA from Parsons, while simultaneously working in a gallery. First runner-up Young Sun Han told The Observer after the show ended that he has continued to make art and that he too holds a job in a gallery. The show’s winner, Kymia Nawabi, meanwhile, explained to us that she has “been working a lot, you know, unfortunately at waitressing jobs,” adding of the season’s end, “It was kind of like going from being in this really strange wonderful magical weird bubble and then back into a really harsh reality again.”

How could this be? How come the artist who most faithfully and unerringly followed Bravo’s path to Great Artist-dom is not being feted by the art-world elite, fed plump grapes by Glenn Lowry, while Eli Broad fans her with a palm leaf? Do the powerful not watch television? “People definitely watch,” Mr. Han confirmed for us. “Definitely people are engaged with it in the real art world—whether they love the show or hate the show. It’s a guilty pleasure for some, but they’re watching.”

Ms. Nawabi expressed similar hopes that somebody important might be tuning in, asserting, “I just want everyone and anyone to see this work. I made a show that I would be so excited to show anyone, whether it be Simon de Pury or … you know, anyone … or Saatchi! Or whoever.”

Yet we’d hazard that—although the caliber of the artists on season two was generally higher than those in the first season of Work of Art—those former contestants who make it in the real art world had their foot in the door before they appeared on Bravo, and don’t suffer delusions that their careers will be made by their stint on reality TV.

“I think people will know my name or face a little bit more,” Ms. Jimenez wryly told us of how her life has changed since receiving the bronze medal in the grand arena of art reality TV. “But I don’t think it necessarily means that Gagosian’s going to call me and be like, ‘We want you to be represented in our gallery.’ I think that’s a long-term process.”

editorial@observer.com

Detail from Kymia Nawabi's "Not For Long, My Forlorn"

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen™, adieu. Last night, it was indeed that time again, that tragic hour when the last of the fresh-faced gaggle of not-so-good artists must wave goodbye to the party, that art world soirée to which only the greats are invited. For Wednesday heralded the finale of Bravo’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, that solemn, two-season-honored tradition wherein the future of Western culture is determined on reality TV.

In the first nine episodes, our abundantly tressed, and fancily dressed show host, China Chow, shed copious tears over the elimination of eleven contestants, leaving us with just three contenders for the preeminent title in the vast arena of competitive fine-art television programs. Young Sun Han, Kymia Nawabi, and Sara Jimenez would be the lucky artists given the opportunity to spend three months and $7,500 preparing a final gallery exhibit “to blow the art world away,” according to Ms. Chow.

Two months into their labors, super-suave auctioneer and contestant mentor Simon de Pury would swing by — driving hilariously tiny Fiats, “furnished” by the show’s auto-making sponsors — to check on their work. (One can only imagine that his home kingdom issued a special license to him just for the occasion, much like when Prince William motored away from his royal nuptials. Or else the whole driving montage was prepared in front of a green screen, with Ryan Gosling as a backup stuntman/body double.)

Eventually, each member of the trio would hang work in a final gallery show, hosted by Mr. de Pury in the Phillips de Pury & Company galleries. And then, finally, the victor would be wreathed in (non-literal) laurels. He or she would fulfill his/her destiny: To receive a solo show in the “world famous” — lest you forgot since last week how widely its renown reigns — Brooklyn Museum, a cover story in the utterly mysterious and potentially nefarious Blue Canvas magazine, and $100,000 courtesy of Fiat. One work by the winner would be auctioned off at Phillips de Pury, with all the proceeds going to the artist. Basically, if you had taken as a given that there were any stakes at all in this competition, they were as high as they ever would be last night.

YOUNG SUN HAN
“When you come back into town, don’t bring the PC parade with you,” lofty-haired gallerist/judge Bill Powers cautioned Mr. Han before the contestant headed off to Chicago, Illinois to prepare for his final showing. And he doesn’t: After nixing a project featuring some kind of road-tripping South Korean security booth — which Mr. de Pury quite rightly deemed “boring” — Mr. Han brings a funeral procession to the gallery.

He decks his allotted space with strung-up shirts belonging to his late father, to which Mr. Han affixes photographs of his father wasting away in a hospital. He also puts together a morbid shrine displaying the contents of his father’s pockets at the time of his death. Also, Mr. Han tosses in some projected photos of his mother, who is battling cancer, as well as random portraits of his hunky stock-analyst boyfriend.

“It’s about family, losing someone, and the full circle of going through life and death,” he explains. “I’m really hoping that the show puts people through the gauntlet of emotions.”

KYMIA NAWABI
Ms. Nawabi doesn’t even have to leave the borough to get to work on her final pieces: She lives in Manhattan with her boyfriend, a photographer and bartender with whom she worked at a Turkish restaurant, and his parents. And when Mr. de Pury comes calling, she whips out a photo album featuring pictures of her mom (a total babe) and her dad, who, you might recall, died in a tragic jet-skiing accident. And here’s where it gets weird: in the photos, her family is jet skiing. This makes Mr. Han’s death-candy totem look tame.

Anyway, Ms. Nawabi has, at the time of Mr. de Pury’s visit, vaguely settled on ghosts and religion and stuff as the subject of her final body of work. She shows the aristocratic auctioneer some horrible, kitschy sculptures — imagine a Cabbage Patch doll of a dead kid with diamonds balanced on its eyeballs — which Mr. de Pury calls “horrendous” as Ms. Nawabi weeps. “It’s the last thing I would ever want to own,” he adds, winning our best slur of the season award.

Handily enough, when the final show rolls around, Ms. Nawabi has completed a series of well-crafted drawings portraying strange scenes of ghosts and mythological beasts and nightmare creatures. Details from these drawings have also been recreated as 3D forms in the center of the room, but these sculptures really can’t stand up to the beautifully executed works on the walls.

SARA JIMENEZ
Back in Brooklyn, Ms. Jimenez lives with some gross futons and her boyfriend, who seems wary about the whole relationship. (When Mr. de Pury inquires as to how long they’ve been dating, the cagey gentleman quickly responds “less than two years.”) But her studio is filled with a promising array of work: She’s executed a performance piece on the street, for which she dressed up as a bobble-headed, white-clad monster who solicited confessions from strangers, writing down their weightiest problems. If she approached us, we’d probably run screaming from the giant mosquito/bird/cult-leader — you know, if you see something say something — but she seems to actually have gotten people to collaborate, chronicling their lust, addictions, and desperation, which is impressive.

She ditches some of her lame early paintings and sculptures, creating a final array of works, relating to the confessions she collected, in every medium — there’s a bird cage from which 1,000 paper cranes burst, a haunting dead-skin-cell self-portrait, a mattress filled with hypodermic needles, lingerie made of human hair, and a hot-glue cobweb. It’s all kind of Tim Hawkinson meets Kiki Smith, and if I got to choose right here and now, she would win.

THE FINAL FINAL CRITIQUE
The whole gang of judges and contestants of seasons past and present has gathered for the gallery show. Everybody’s favorite former slimeball contestant the Sucklord even shows up with a gift for art critic/judge Jerry Saltz, who only recently eviscerated him on TV: a glow-in-the-dark action figure of a certain “bald Jewish art critic,” the traditional present for the second night of Hanukkah.

The exhibit, primarily, is a testament to the fact that when artists have three months instead of three hours to make work, they do a better job. But that’s not what Mr. Powers, Ms. Chow, stony-faced Mr. Saltz, and guest judge/contemporary artist KAWS (who is soft-spoken and newt-like) have gathered to discuss. Across the board, Mr. Saltz seems to applaud contestants for working outside their usual mediums, while Bill Powers — who is incidentally more tan than any other person in the history of the world, excepting Oompa Loompas — likes the more single-message, limited-medium displays.

Mr. Han’s “Bool-sa-jo” (Korean for phoenix, his mother’s nickname for his dying father) elicits the comments of “sympathetic magic” and “really brave” from Mr. Powers, but irks Mr. Saltz with its straightforward, relentless drive toward meaning. “In some ways you don’t leave a gap for mystery, and that can shut out a viewer,” Mr. Saltz insightfully comments. But of course, the piece makes Ms. Chow cry. (Mr. Han’s mother, meanwhile, offers a perfect mom-comment, with her tear-free “you did a nice job.”)

“Not for Long, My Forlorn,” is the title of Ms. Nawabi’s expertly executed exploration of a mystical afterlife, over which Misters Powers and Saltz bicker again, but the general consensus is that the works are lovely, especially the one that (ick) depicts a boat and is an ode to her father — who, let us recall once again, died jet skiing.

Ms. Jimenez’s “Anonymous Contemplations,” makes den mother Ms. Chow effuse that she’s “so proud,” and Mr. Saltz admit that the showing represents “the most life I’ve seen in your work.” Alas, Mr. Powers thinks the eclectic arrangement “felt like it was kind of a collection of short stories… a little scattershot,” and so — drum roll, please — it is not Ms. Jimenez (the second runner up), nor Mr. Han (the first runner up) who ascends to a plane of art-world greatness.

Rather, it is Kymia Nawabi who is now, officially, according to the Powers That Be (at Bravo) the Next Great Artist. To which we can only respond in Ms. Nawabi’s own words: “Not for Long, My Forlorn.” For forlorn she shall be, when season three rolls around, and the next Next Great Artist takes her place.

"Work of Art." (Bravo)

Paul Gauguin sailed all the way to French Polynesia to find his languidly exotic Tahitians. Swiss photographer Robert Frank drove straight across the U.S. to document the utter weirdness of The Americans. Diane Arbus plunged into the seedy underbelly of New York to bring back traces of its oddballs and freaks. Now, the art historians behind Bravo’s reality gem Work of Art: The Next Great Artist have brought this time-tested trope of artist-as-pioneering-colonizer/anthropologist straight to your TV set. On last week’s episode, Work of Art’s scholars argued that to be a truly great artist, one must leave the comfort of one’s Midtown West condo and vast studio space and venture out into the great unknown, to unveil the secrets of the “other” that inhabits the dangerous wilds beyond.

For their latest challenge, our contestants rode the treacherous Metro North rails for a harrowing hour and 10 minutes, to Cold Spring, N.Y. This is a historic village that the foolhardy refer to as a “weekend getaway” for Manhattanites, but which Bravo correctly identified as a paradigm of that alien, alarming thing known as small-town America. To succeed, the artists would have to dip into this dangerous otherworld, and emerge unscathed, brandishing a portrait. They would have to mingle with the eccentric Babbitt types they encountered along Main Street, without forgetting that as potentially great artists they firmly belonged to the New York establishment, and must neither take the country rubes seriously nor scare them off with their cultural superiority.  

Show host and Manhattan society princess China Chow (who hazarded a cameo in Cold Spring incognito, in a giant trench coat) commended the episode’s winner on going “into their world,” for presenting the common man and woman as no more or less common than they are. “I met them and they’re cartoons!” Ms. Chow gleefully announced of the winner’s sitters. It’s “an American type come to life,” critic and judge Jerry Saltz said of the prize-winning portrait. In short, this was a challenge in remaining aloof, in sketching the contours of an outlandish type of stranger, without getting too close, or delving too deep, before hopping the next train back to civilization.

EPISODE 9: In which we learned that when an artist ventures into the Henri Rousseau-ian wilderness of the non-N.Y.C. boondocks, he must retain the appropriate distance from his subject, crafting portraits that are neither too complex (for that would not match the simplicity of the indigenous peoples) nor too generic (for the small-town native is only of interest for its weirdness).

SUMMARY: The contestants headed out from Grand Central Terminal to Cold Spring, where they were presented with $200 with which to secure a portrait of one of the weird and wily locals in only two hours. This, the penultimate challenge, would be a double elimination, leaving only three contestants to move on to the season finale.

Contestant Kymia Nawabi latched onto Bob and Barbara, drawing a caricature of these oddball proprietors of a cramped shop specializing in dolls and other creepy ephemera. Young Sun Han, meanwhile, managed to tear himself away from the B&B’s jacuzzi long enough to commission a portrait from Terence Donovan, the resident creative, whom Mr. Han photographed in the act of painting, juxtaposing his uninteresting extreme-close-up photos with Mr. Donovan’s stylish artwork for the gallery show.

Lola Thompson fell in with a pair of rare-currency collectors, whom she depicted in a quite lovely abstract pastiche composed of collaged bills, text and other relevant detritus. Dusty Mitchell, on the other hand, went the route of Chuck Close with the munchies, crafting a paint-by-numbers homage to a cute little girl out of M&Ms. In the meantime, Sara Jimenez was busy batting her eyelashes at firemen, one of whom she decided to portray in a back-lit aluminum portrait, which was paired with some ugly, dangly nameplates.

Ms. Nawabi won, which doesn’t mean much at this point, except that she’ll be headed to next week’s finale along with Mr. Han and Ms. Jimenez. The tearful Mr. Mitchell and Ms. Thompson, meanwhile, were shown the door.

LESSON: “I like art to be accessible. I don’t want to make it either too personal or too confusing, where a viewer can’t have access to it,” Mr. Mitchell, who likened Cold Spring to his quaint Arkansas hometown, explained to The Observer after the ninth episode had aired. “The challenge, you know, was for a portrait. A portrait doesn’t necessarily have to be laced with conceptuality.”

And in so saying, Mr. Mitchell revealed the cause of his downfall. The viewer should never have total access to the “other” in an exotic portrait, even if the “other” in this case was a lovely little girl—in Mr. Mitchell’s words, “such a bubbly kid.” For never forget, some day she will grow up to be an eccentric Amy Sherman-Palladino dramedy-ready character just like her mother (who named her Mairead, for goodness’s sake). Art snobs cannot empathize with such folksy folks and still maintain their pretensions, so Mr. Mitchell should stop trying to ply them with candy.

On the other end of the conceptual spectrum, meanwhile, was Ms. Thompson, who explained, “I stand by what I made” even if “the reality television format doesn’t necessarily lend itself to being able to talk about work that’s kind of complicated.” She affirmed that she didn’t want to make a caricature of the coin collectors, Dennis and Tommy, who, unfortunately enough for her chances of winning, “weren’t surrounded by, like, weird kitschy objects; they didn’t have that going for them.”

Rather, “they were smart intellectual guys who were nerdy and into history,” she said. “I think a portrait of what they’re obsessed with and what their life work is about is appropriate.” And that is why her nonfigurative, composite portrait did not make them seem zany or strange at all. It was just an interesting, complex, aesthetically appealing artwork; it didn’t let us condescendingly admire the eccentricities of bubbly shopkeepers, ruddy firemen or amateur painters.

CONCLUSION: They don’t let you into the Great Artist Canon until you’ve turned a sardonic, haughty or at least clinically anthropological gaze on a few out-of-towners. So the sooner Mr. Mitchell starts mocking children rather than having them (his wife’s pregnant again, mazel tov!) and Lola stops confessing to us that she wishes she seemed less bitchy on TV (who likes watching programs about nice girls?), the sooner the doors of the reality-TV-art-world Pantheon shall swing open before them.

editorial@observer.com

"Work of Art." (Bravo)

“Come for a day, stay for a week,” reads the tourism website of Cold Spring, New York. That's a fine slogan, but it did not, alas, apply to our intrepid contestants on Bravo’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist this week, who were destined to hop a train from Grand Central for a brief, nervous jaunt up and down the town's Main Street, during which time they marveled at how picturesque (read: creepy) everything was and how weird the locals were, before fleeing back to the (much less weird and creepy) world of reality television.

“The name makes it sound like it has something to do with spa treatments,” contestant Young Sun Han murmured rapturously, as if he’d just discovered a Shangri-La for TV’s gay stereotypes. (Look, there’s village councilman Sean Hayes!)

“The further we get away from the city the more it looks like home to me,” Dusty meanwhile drawled sweetly. We've ridden Metro North’s Hudson Line, and the back lots of New England mini malls do not particularly resemble Arkansas’s amber waves of grain, in our humble opinion.

“Welcome to the quaint town of Cold Spring, New York,” says show hostess/rich person China Chow, looking like a Strangers on a Train murderess in a big trench coat. Two people were going to get the boot, we learned. But, “If you survive this challenge you will be competing for the grand prize,” Ms. Chow threatened. Survive this challenge? Is that what they’ve been doing with the eliminated contestants? The challenge, if you’re interested, was to take $200 and find a way to create a portrait of a verifiable, salt of the Thornton Wilder-ian earth Cold Spring resident.

KYMIA NAWABI
“I have laryngitis today,” rasps the first quaint resident that Ms. Nawabi hassled. But fear not, for Bob and Barbara, owners of some kind of haunted tchochke shop, rise to the occasion, proving themselves to be part charming Stars Hollow, part “all work and no play.” In Ms. Nawabi’s terms, they’re a solid blend of “weirdness and also sweetness.” The couple, we learn, has “always loved dolls.” So Ms. Nawabi makes a kind of dark, demonic Norman Rockwell painting of the duo, portraying them as ice skaters in front of scary antique miscellany—they skated on their first date. “The only non-conventional thing is that they’re going to have several arms,” artist mentor/auctioneer Simon de Pury frets of Ms. Nawabi’s painting. Which is funny, because when he gesticulates, he looks like a stop-motion photograph of a pitcher. “Get some weirdness in it,” he cautions.

YOUNG SUN HAN
Mr. Han makes a beeline to the nearest bed and breakfast, to inquire about spa treatments and also “town secrets,” because he’s clearly been watching The Witches of Eastwick, and believes the two go hand in hand. While he gets a guided tour of the inn’s nine rooms, variously furnished with Jacuzzis and wood-burning fireplaces he is left scrambling, at the very last moment, for a subject. Luckily, he pinpoints the next great artist of Cold Spring at the Terence Donovan gallery—namely, jolly Mr. Donovan himself, whom Mr. Han pays $200 for a 20-minute portrait. And guess what? Terence’s portrait is really nice—it’s got a little Karen Kilimnik, or even Elizabeth Peyton in its saucy yet tender broad-stroked depiction of its young male subject. (“You have kind of Justin Bieber-ish hair,” Terence says, which is totally something we can imagine Ms. Peyton saying to any of her sweetly puckish subjects.) In the gallery, Mr. Han leans Terence’s painting against a wall, behind wooden planks plastered with extreme-close-up photographs of Terence that he took of the artist while he worked.

LOLA THOMPSON
Having been soundly rejected by the town motorcycle guy, Ms. Thompson seeks out the men who are next on the list of people most likely to succumb to her witchy ways and nymphette wiles. Dennis and Tommy, rare-coin-collecting gentlemen, succumb to her flirtation, handing over a 1928 five-dollar bill to her. Ms. Thompson then prepares a multi-faceted, mostly non-figurative portrait/tribute to the two collectors, featuring a letter she wrote to them, which begins, “Dear Dennis and Tommy, You are the secret historians of Cold Spring” (or maybe not so secret…). There’s also some tinfoil, and a pyramid of blown-up images of historic bills, and some other things on a shelf.

DUSTY MITCHELL
Mr. Mitchell shyly settles on a little girl as his subject. She likes candy—“all kinds!”— and reminds the contestant of his daughter Cora, whom he abandoned in her infancy to go off to (an art-reality-TV) battle, and who, when this episode was filmed, had just turned one the previous day. Mr. Mitchell decides to make a mosaic of his young subject’s face from M&Ms. Mr. de Pury—who, in his most hilarious joke of season two, says he wants to “come to AR-Kansas”—briefly convinces Mr. Mitchell to work on a portrait made from folded-paper fortune-tellers, before the contestant runs out of time and returns to his candy idea. By that point, however, it’s too late for the glue to dry, so M&Ms keep falling off it. Mr. Mitchell hopes that everyone will find this decomposition “interesting.”

SARA JIMENEZ
Because she always seems wryly uninterested in everything around her, Ms. Jimenez drives away her first potential subject, before finding friends among the local firemen. One older firefighter, Jackie, is of particular interest to Ms. Jimenez. He’s battled blazes for 58 years, thereby inspiring a quite charming backlit portrait made from aluminum (which weirdly kind of resembles Mao) paired with an uninspiring dangly sculpture of aluminum and charcoal nameplates, one for every year Jackie served.

THE CRITIQUE
This week’s guest judge is pop-star portraitist Richard Phillips, who, for the record, is much taller than critic/judge Jerry Saltz and Ms. Chow, even in her crazy-tall heels, but maybe not taller than gallerist/judge Bill Powers’ hair. The local portrait subjects show up for the gallery showing, and luckily enough, none of them are perceptibly offended by their variously unflattering, candy-coated, epistolary and so forth depictions.

WINNER
Kymia Nawabi wins the first slot on the final episode for her cartoonish portrait because, as Ms. Chow says of Bob and Barbara, “I met them and they’re cartoons!” That’s not very nice, we think, and neither is Mr. Phillips’ comment on the piece: “At first I was throwing up inside.” But apparently none of that matters when you’re in the final trio of possible next great artists.

ALSO HEADED TO THE FINALE
Young Sun Han, who we think should probably be facing an intellectual-property/copyright suit from Terence right about now, slinks by, even though the judges point out that he should have just shown Terence’s painting. (Weird how the next great artist is not even a contestant on this show… Team Terence!) Sara Jimenez, meanwhile, also will compete in the final episode, mostly because Mr. Saltz is so proud that his little charge worked outside of her “comfort zone.” Personally, we’re freaked out that she referred to her portrait of Jackie (who’s alive and thriving) as a “memorial.”

GOING HOME
Dusty Mitchell is at last taking that long covered-wagon ride back to Arkansas, mostly because too many of his artworks were literally paint-by-numbers pieces. And Lola Thompson will hop Al Pacino’s jet back to Los Angeles because Ms. Chow doesn’t understand why the currency pyramid counts as a portrait (odd, since Ms. Chow resembles money). Also, it’s too scattered in its abstraction for the rest of the judges. And there is much crying.

"Work of Art." (David Giesbrecht/Bravo)

“Throughout history, artists have always faced a struggle with art versus commerce,” Work of Art: The Next Great Artist contestant mentor and real-world auctioneer extraordinaire Simon de Pury professed, with the sweeping arm gesture of a true scholar, in the latest episode of our favorite reality-TV survey on the Art World at Large. We eagerly nodded as we scribbled “history = art v. commerce” in our Trapper Keeper. If it’s on Bravo, it’s probably true.

What we had yet to glean from episode eight, however, was that “commerce” actually means pseudo-artistic kitsch (usually spray-painted T-shirts, sometimes underwear, always from American Apparel) peddled by devious artist-mendicants on the mean streets of Tribeca. True “art,” on the other hand, is barely tainted by such lowly forms of pecuniary exchange, and is rather more fully at home in the rarefied, white-walled shrines to creativity known as blue-chip galleries, where ne’er a word of commerce shall e’er be spoken.

“For your challenge, it’s time to sell out,” that teetering billboard for couture/show-host China Chow told her snooty charges, who looked appropriately aghast. And to “sell out,” we gathered, meant to sell artworks outside of the gallery system. To successfully peddle your pieces outside the art-dealing complex might mean a short-term success, Bravo’s intellectual top dogs (a judging panel including two New York gallerists, for what it’s worth) informed us, but it’s back in the gallery where an artwork’s true, auratic value shines through.

EPISODE 8: In which we learned that to make work enjoyed by the hoi polloi is fine, so long as you view the whole experience as a brief out-of-gallery experiment in relational aesthetics from which you can earn a little cash before sprinting back to your gallery’s white-walled panic room.

SUMMARY: In the latest episode of Work of Art, the remaining contestants were presented with the “sell out” challenge, for which they would have to craft at least one artwork to vend to the public, from tables set up in Tribeca Park. The hitch was that this work must also be “worthy of presenting in a gallery show” [emphasis ours]. The artists were nominally paired off, but basically worked independently. The duo that sold the most was promised immunity in the next challenge and $30,000 plucked from the padded coffers of the mystifying Blue Canvas magazine, which this week we will libelously posit is funded by the illicit sale of tiger pelts.

Relational artworks fared well, with extra points for confronting the non-art world with artistic nudity—contestant Lola Thompson got naked for a self-portrait—though there was sadly not a sensory deprivation pool in sight. It turned out that while shoppers liked T-shirts—bearing images of everything from Fruit Roll-Ups to boobs—the plebeians preferred “artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space,” as Bourriaud would put it. Basically, they liked getting their portraits drawn (courtesy of contestant Sara Jimenez), trading their autographs for that of an artist (Kymia Nawabi), and having secrets whispered in their ears by sultry nymphets (Ms. Thompson).

Ms. Jimenez’s team, which also included the booty-bearing, short-shorts-wearing contestant Young Sun Han, earned the most money at their booth and therefore received Blue Canvas’s blood money. Sarah Kabot, meanwhile, was chucked out for her “hipster, cool, Native American paper headdresses” and mammary-emblazoned T’s, which in the gallery came off as a “Halloween costume,” according to Half Gallery owner/judge Bill Powers.

LESSON: “I don’t think that most contemporary artists actually think that there is some kind of struggle between art and commerce, that is kind of this odd, Marxist critique,” Ms. Kabot told The Observer after her brutal elimination was aired, proving that she had indeed succumbed to that fatal temptation to distrust something Mr. de Pury aphoristically stated as fact. She did, however, seem to understand that she was given the boot because her artwork “failed as a work of art,” and because, in her words, “it wasn’t extraordinary, exciting or thought provoking.”

That was certainly one reason she had to go, the other being that she failed to acknowledge how insurmountably deep the divide Bravo was digging between highbrow art sold in tony galleries and lowbrow art sold on the street truly was. “The idea that you would actually sell your artwork and that would support you, that that would be your livelihood is, I think, most artists’ dream,” Ms. Kabot intoned dreamily, without offering a list of the acceptable places in which one can sell their artwork and still not be a sell-out (alphabetically it goes something like Andrew Kreps to ZieherSmith).

“Even artists who attempt to position themselves so far outside of commerce, like Rirkrit Tiravanija, I mean, he’s wildly successful commercially,” she argued, before sensibly adding, “Maybe I would have been better off if I’d cooked everyone grilled cheese sandwiches on the street and then done that in the gallery as well.” Yes, we heartily agree, having just last week consumed some spicy curry in MoMA’s hallowed halls. In fact, we might even suggest to Ms. Kabot, if we still had her on the phone, that she could have built a giant silver slide that shot from Tribeca Park all the way into Gagosian Gallery’s foyer.

CONCLUSION: If we’re going to split hairs about what it entails to “sell out” (according to the Oxford English Dictionary, U.S. political slang meaning “to betray a person or cause for gain”), we might begin to question the motives of anyone competing on an art reality-television show. But then again, we’re running out of space, so we’ll just stick with Bravo’s notion, that selling out is what one does when one doesn’t have gallery representation (which, upon second thought, may or may not be synonymous with the reasons for signing up to be on an art reality-television show).

editorial@observer.com

Selling art to Simon de Pury, on Work of Art

“The following program may contain material that is unsuitable for young viewers. Parental discretion is advised,” read the ominous title card preceding last night’s episode of Bravo’s art-world reality romp, Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. Immediately thereafter, the sassy sex-kitten contestant, Lola Thompson, — who probably still gets carded trying to buy tickets to R-rated films — proclaimed, “I need to put more of myself out there to show the judges more of who I am.” One didn’t really need to keep watching. It was already clear that Ms. Thompson was going to get naked.

But first she had to tag along with the rest of the program’s straggling competitors to Tribeca Park, where three street-vendor booths, complete with middle-school-book-sale cash boxes, were set up. “Throughout history artists have always faced a struggle with art versus commerce,” lectured bespoke-besuited contestant-mentor Simon de Pury, who, in his real-life role as mega-auctioneer is perhaps particularly attuned to the plight of artists struggling against the lords of art commerce. “For your challenge, it’s time to sell out,” show host China Chow added [insert your own joke here about Ms. Chow and expertise in selling-out].

The contestants were told to break into pairs (although no teamwork was demonstrated from that point onward) and create physical artworks to sell to passersby over a two-hour period. The team that earned the most from their sales would gain immunity in the next challenge and $30,000 — furnished, of course, by the ever-more-mysterious Blue Canvas magazine, which is officially the last magazine in the world to have mountains of money to throw at artists, and possibly un-great ones at that. Also, some version of whatever the contestants were selling had to be suitable to be hung in a gallery show.

SARA JIMENEZ and YOUNG SUN HAN
Since the show has run out of shocking revelations to whip out when the art stuff gets boring, we’re left with dull disclosures such as Ms. Jimenez’s “I’m a really fast draw-er,” or the fact that she’s on unemployment (the better to buy chunky necklaces with!). We also learn that Mr. Han’s boyfriend likes his “very petite, round, and pert” butt. So it makes sense that the duo chooses to play up their better features, racing to American Apparel and purchasing “cheeky” (ha!) shorts to wear and also to draw on.

They rake in the cash because Ms. Jimenez not only peddles her usual moody bloody-vagina-filled watercolors but also milks that age-old cash cow of sketching people’s portraits for them, on demand. Mr. de Pury clarifies his sexuality for anyone who was confused by his impeccable tie collection by saying that he “can do without” Mr. Han’s tiny shorts, but then gasps “Oh my god, it’s getting better and better,” upon glimpsing Ms. Jimenez in an identical item of clothing. Back in the gallery, Mr. Han displays brightly colored paintings of men’s briefs emblazoned with smiley faces (think Joe Boxer 2.0) as well as Sharpie-drawings of ghosts (or something) while Ms. Jimenez throws up some of her wan paintings.

KYMIA NAWABI and DUSTY MITCHELL
At first Ms. Nawabi considers crafting notecards that state “support artists,” which she would give to people who made a “donation,” because she’d much rather think of the challenge “like a fundraiser” rather than as selling out. “The person who donates this amount to us will have something to take away with them,” Ms. Nawabi says, revealing that she believes that she gets all of her food and clothing and art supplies from nice people, to whom she donates money. Anyway, she scraps that idea and instead sells slips of white paper bearing her signature for $5, also acquiring her buyer’s (clearly worthless) signature in the exchange. In the gallery, she hangs a grid of her signatures alongside the signatures of strangers.

Dusty, we discover, has a t-shirt company named Dirt back home in the boonies, so he’s psyched to make political tees, featuring a red-outlined map of America, in the center of which is a black surveillance camera, which looks like a Fruit Roll-Up. In the gallery, he presents a road sign bearing the same insignia. It’s all pretty abysmal but he starts crying and talking about his baby — “she needs me to survive; that makes me feel bad because I’m here and I’m not there to give her what she needs right now” — and it’s really sad and makes us think he won’t get the boot this time around.

SARAH KABOT and LOLA THOMPSON
Try to imagine a “hipster, cool, Native American paper headdress,” which, according to Ms. Kabot, is “cool but not hippie.” Now add t-shirts that are “sexy but also playful,” so the whole shebang is “like a craft fair — quirky but fun.” Yes, Ms. Kabot’s idea was just as whacked out and incoherent as all that sounds. And of course, since she’s Ms. Thompson’s partner on this challenge, she has to incorporate boobs and penises, which she spray-paints on the white gallery walls beneath her paper crowns.

And finally, ladies and gents, the moment we’ve all been waiting for. Yes, Ms. Thompson gets naked and snaps a self-portrait. On top of this photograph — in which we can plainly view the nipples and bushy region that are so daintily blurred out when Ms. Thompson is briefly shown, on video, in the buff — is printed a rainbow litany of self-deprecating, awkwardly wry confessions. It actually looks like an American Apparel ad: Dov Charney and Terry Richardson would both no doubt give it two thumbs up. Mr. de Pury, meanwhile, actually puts his reading glasses on to inspect Ms. Thompson’s “piece,” admitting, “it’s very difficult for me to focus on the text because I’m a little sidetracked by the background.” But basically he likes it: “I think it’s gorgeous and very attractive,” he murmurs.

And if that isn’t your thing: those shoppers not wishing to throw down for this particular Vice magazine cover, are invited to pay for a personalized secret from the artist. A three-year-old girl forks over 25 cents and gets a tidbit whispered in her ear -- one so disturbing that she begins to weep.

THE CRITIQUE

DUSTY MITCHELL earns $185
KYMIA NAWABI earns $96
TEAM TOTAL=$281

This team doesn’t make off like bandits, but they do O.K., except for the fact that everyone hates Mr. Mitchell’s road sign, and basic concept. “Why didn’t they buy the sign?” critic Jerry Saltz jibes, before raising his hand, calling on himself, and snickering, “I know why… because it’s awful!” (It is true that someone mistook the surveillance camera for a mailbox and gallerist Bill Powers thought it was a printer cartridge). “It just was kind of, ‘Here’s a map with a camera on it,’” Ms. Chow adds, pulling out the big guns from her art-critical artillery. People enjoy Ms. Nawabi’s work, though, because it’s literally what she sold on the street, pinned up in the gallery.

LOLA THOMPSON earns $217
SARAH KABOT earns $95
TEAM TOTAL = $312

Obviously people like to buy pictures of naked women, but gallerist and guest judge Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn makes Ms. Thompson’s piece sound better than that by explaining,“the nudity was what you attracted the public with and then when they sat down with you, you gave them something even better.” Of Ms. Kabot’s pervy craft project, Mr. Saltz begins, “What we’re seeing in the gallery may not be art because it comes off as a…” “Halloween costume,” says Mr. Powers, finishing the sentence of his peer (and in the process revealing that he must have worn some very strange outfits trick-or-treating back in the day). It is Ms. Kabot, by the way, who is given the old heave-ho and kicked off the show.

YOUNG SUN HAN earns $129
SARA JIMENEZ earns $320
TEAM TOTAL = $449

“Excuse me? That’s men’s underwear?” Mr. Saltz, who we now have reason to believe is a boxers man, says of Mr. Han’s paintings of briefs. “Is this your assumption — that we’re so limited that we can only see a painting as a work of art?” Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn jeeringly adds. Nobody, however, asks how a painting of a bloody naked lady got mixed in with Ms. Jimenez’s portraits of people in the park. Because she has supplied the two things people love: naked ladies and pictures of themselves. So this team wins.