China Chow. (Courtesy Nowness)

China Chow, the co-host, with Simon de Pury, of Bravo’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, has a brief interview on Nowness in which she opens up on the occasion of her stint on the cover of Vogue China.

Ms. Chow, who is the daughter of restauranteur Michael Chow, fondly remembers “the night that my father threw an incredible party to celebrate bringing the Beijing Opera to Lincoln Center in New York City.” Her grandfather was Zhou Xinfang, the renowned opera performer whose likeness appeared on a Chinese postage stamp. She also relays a story in which she investigates the rumor that she was the cousin of Chow Yun-Fat.

And of course, being surrounded since childhood by art world elite, her current role as co-host of an art show seems only natural. Her early inspirations?

“In particular, those who were around the most really made an impact on me: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Andy Warhol.”

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.

From left: Houmard, Neidich and Schindler. (Photos courtesy of Patrick McMullan)

Quality restaurant art is nothing new, especially in New York. When it opened in the late ’50s, the Four Seasons Restaurant, in the iconic Seagrams Building, had art by Picasso, Miró and Jackson Pollock on the walls. (The dining room was meant to get a series by Mark Rothko, but he pulled out of the project, and the paintings now hang in three museums.) The food/art nexus may have culminated with the freewheeling 1970s, when Gordon Matta-Clark had his restaurant, Food, in Soho—compared with that, most restaurant offerings seem pretty staid. These days, you can go to Casa Lever, in the architecturally groovy Lever House, and gaze at myriad Warhol prints of celebrities—Hitchcock, Sly Stallone—while you’re eating your $52 “Costata” T-bone steak. And if you’re looking for something a bit more classical, there’s always Maxfield Parrish’s monumental mural, Old King Cole, which hangs elegantly above the bar in the St. Regis Hotel. But a new joint set to open by the end of the year is bringing New York restaurant art to a whole new level of downtown hipness.

ACME, at 9 Great Jones Street, is owned by Jean-Marc Houmard, co-owner of Indochine, Jon Neidich, who used to manage the bar at the Boom Boom Room and Evanly Schindler, the founder of Blackbook and former president of Interview, who is making his entree to the restaurant world with this narrow bistro. Mr. Houmard has also brought in his frequent partner Huy Chi Le. The chef is Mads Refslund, of the acclaimed Noma in Copenhagen. The restaurant’s initial artistic offerings include works by downtown fixtures like Hanna Liden and the Bruce High Quality Foundation, as well as contemporary blue-chip favorites like Peter Doig and Richard Prince, though the owners say this is just the beginning, and plan to cycle in new works once the venue opens.

“Every restaurant does art,” Mr. Schindler said. “Every company tries to work with artists, these days more than ever, so we’re not just trying to do art for the sake of art. But at the same time there is a methodology here, which is riffing on the Dada aesthetic, the anti-art idea that’s irreverent and fun.”

Ms. Liden’s statue, which will be visible through ACME’s front window once it opens, is a take on Marcel Duchamp’s inverted Bicycle Wheel, his first ready-made piece. Instead of a stool, Ms. Liden’s wheel sits on a stack of plastic folding chairs to the right of the foyer. Woven between the spokes in blue neon are the words “HAVE A NICE DAY,” the letters on the final word disintegrating, as if whoever is uttering the phrase can’t keep a straight face. A reference to her obsession with those fake, well-meaning sayings found on bodega bags, it’s a bit like a Tracey Emin neon, though it’s also a bit like that Batman movie where Catwoman smashes a neon sign in her apartment. Once the facade is done, the piece will be visible from the street.

On the wall to the left and just past the entrance there are prints by Mr. Doig, Josephine Meckseper and René Ricard from the Neidich family’s personal collection, clustered with the second brand-new piece, a photo by Olympia Scarry commissioned by Neville Wakefield, the independent curator who worked on the last PS1 “Greater New York” show. Ms. Scarry happens to be Mr. Wakefield’s partner and her photo, like the Liden, also plays with Duchamp, in this case the photograph of the artist in his later years playing chess with a nude Eve Babitz. Ms. Scarry set her photo in the Swiss Alps, and has a nude woman playing chess with a goat. The lighting is low enough that most of these pieces are difficult to see, and the works have nothing in common with each other, or the surrounding decor, which is café society meets casbah—checkered floors and tan walls.

“A lot of time when there’s art in restaurants it’s trophy hunter-status, in your face,” said gallerist Bill Powers, who used to work with Mr. Schindler at Blackbook and commissioned the Liden. “Like Gramercy Park Hotel or Lever House. On the opposite end of the spectrum are the anonymous murals at the Waverly Inn, which are nice but very subtle. Here, the owners thought you can do something that’s relevant and still is a little more integrated.”

You can almost miss the Bruce High Quality Foundation bust that sits behind the bar, amid liquor bottles—though Bruce associate Vito Schnabel didn’t when he arrived on Thursday and sat down at the bar right in front of it. At the end of the bar on a chalkboard is the quote, “Before Adam met Eve, he was gay,” from Warhol pal Taylor Mead’s book On Amphetamines and in Europe, a passage that also features a cameo of the address 9 Great Jones. A series of Richard Prince prints featuring X-ray-like skulls with Playboy bunny ears are tucked at the far back of the main room.

“At the time he got a ‘cease and desist’ from Playboy because he wasn’t the Richard Prince he is today,” Mr. Powers said. “He was probably a little more of a hambone.”

Though still under construction on Thursday, the restaurant’s basement will be a sort of gallery space featuring a hallway of what was referred to as “doors to nowhere.” Artists contribute their takes on the door and patrons are offered the opportunity to peruse—Aneta Bartos, an artist at the tasting, described her door as a slideshow reel of photos that you watch through a peephole and turn with a crank. At Mr. Wakefield’s suggestion, Martynka Wawrzyniak will contribute a video piece. There are also plans to make use of an abandoned elevator shaft as an art space—but as it always is for young restaurants, much is up in the air.

“We could have reached higher, including big, big names, especially through Neville,” Mr. Schindler said. “We wanted to focus on younger artists for the opening. That’s not to say there won’t be a few big names in the future. It’s in flux.”

For ACME—whose name recalls not only a synonym for “apogee,” but also the company that sold defective bird-catching goods to Wile E. Coyote—popularity feels inevitable. It may even be poised to replace places like Indochine and Bottino as the art world’s dining hall of choice. Though Thursday was just for friends and family—and the owners stressed this several times, because the restaurant is not yet open for business and the appearance that it is might cause a headache with the Health Department—it was still packed, and with just the type of people you’d expect. Glenn O’Brien sat at table next to Richard Kern and his wife, Ms. Wawrzyniak. Mr. Powers and his wife, Cynthia Rowley, debated whether they should stick to appetizers, since their baby-sitter for the evening was a semiknown DJ who had to leave soon for a set. Parker Posey left not long after China Chow entered, and artist Tom Sachs was deep in conversation with Visionaire magazine co-founder and former model Cecilia Dean. The owners may have been right to be nervous, but for any journalists who might have been standing around at the bar, it was pretty clear that these really are the owners’ friends and family.

dduray@observer.com

China Chow and Simon de Pury on "Work of Art." (Courtesy Bravo)

The art world is in Miami. The Sucklord has been booted from the rarefied realm of reality television and is lurking somewhere, probably in Miami. So what do we have left, here at home, to be thankful for? Why, the fact that the search for the next great artist continues for us on the Bravo cable television channel, of course. On Wednesday night, there were seven contestants left in the art-critical arena, and yes, they were challenged, as all artists have been since time immemorial, with the task of creating art to please car-manufacturing television sponsors.

The gang was shepherded to some kind of Fiat showroom, filled with automobiles old and new, where they were informed by vaguely aristocratic reality show mentor Simon de Pury, “The automobile has been an inspiration to artists since they were invented.” (Since artists were invented? Or automobiles? Ah, the Fiat and the ovum paradox.) “Fiat understands how important new inspiration is to the creative spirit,” Mr. de Pury explained, for those of us who were still confused. Richard Prince, John Chamberlain and similarly likeminded auto-loving artists were all, we learned, inspired by the auto-art-industrial complex.

The contestants were then tasked with crafting art using Fiat car parts—quite the serious assignment given that the winner was promised $25,000 “furnished” by the Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (Fiat). (Some very preliminary late-night research determines that you might even be able to buy a new Fiat 500 Sport 150 hatchback for slightly less than that amount. Now we’re talking, Bravo!) “Looks like you guys took the whole car,” show host/socialite/couture hound China Chow exclaimed, just like she did in that weird dream we had last night.

DUSTY MITCHELL
Mr. Mitchell is a man. He likes wood. He does not, however—and at his own admission—know much about cars. He had an aunt who broke her nose in a crash when he was in the second grade, but that’s hardly impressive to Work of Art viewers after the episode featuring fatal jet-skiing accidents, surely. He briefly goes down the making-a-mold-of-my-own-face (eyebrow-loss-be-damned) route of artmaking well known to all desperate art students, before settling on a satisfying, if not stunning, piece that transforms tires into a rolling stamp that spells out, “going to work going home.”

YOUNG SUN
“I’m worried about this challenge… I’ve never owned a car. My favorite car when I was a kid was a limousine because someone else was driving you,” Mr. Sun confided early in the episode, before discussing making out in cars with boys—the combined revelations fulfilling a weird Judy Garland gay stereotype for much of America. Destroying this stereotype (without making particularly compelling art), Mr. Sun then constructs an Exterminator-style robot, which is limply hung from a canvas.

MICHELLE MATSON
Ms. Matson has almost definitely read J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash. If she hasn’t, she should, because she would love it. But, notwithstanding the fact that she was recently the victim of a grisly hit-and-run accident, she sticks to her hip, wryly cartoonish roots and crafts a semi-creepy, but mostly Disney/Pixar-ish gleaming car hood above a sad-sack car hood (the animation of which should be voiced by the ghost of Paul Newman). She ditches an early, fabulous “fetishist window-licker” balloon piece, as well as a giggle-worthy Titanic-inspired fogged window piece for her lackluster happy-car/sad-car construction. But come on, she’s on reality TV! She has to know that if she doesn’t delve into her gruesome past to create something about her most horrible life experience she’s in trouble. Also, she says, “I like how this challenge is so open; like you could do whatever you want,” which is, officially, in the Book of Revelation, the beginning of the end.

SARA JIMENEZ
According to drunken photos of Ms. Jimenez in her drunken youth, it’s good that she never learned to drive—and thank goodness for the healing power of art-on-television, which has helped her “recover in these areas” of intoxicated, debauched behavior. Anyway, for the challenge, she employs a muffler, from which she constructs an angular sculptural formation of foam. It’s better than her usual bulimia-themed twee drawings, but so is a regular, unembellished car muffler.

LOLA THOMPSON
Ms. Thompson is a witch, as it turns out, if you hadn’t already checked to see if she floats. (And not just in the way that TNT turns the word “bitch” into the word “witch” in their television-version of movies… they know drama.) She’s brewing up mineral solutions and her grandmother was a “witch and a healer” who taught her “witchy ways.” Oh wait, scratch that, now she’s making a drawing about her dad (not Al Pacino), and how they went on a road trip to the Grand Canyon. Also, she may or may not be planning to “do like a Tanya Harding” on Young, meaning she’s going to do a triple axel on his ass.

KYMIA NAWABI
Hey, Judy Garland, check this out—Ms. Nawabi is making “stardust” out of a car key. And gallerygoers are going to watch it glitter in some kind of kaleidoscope box.

SARAH KABOT
This contestant owns a bear skin and a buffalo skin rug: two more kinds of skin rugs than Gallerist has in our collection. This fact, along with her father’s very recent death, has inspired her to affix two “skinned” car seats to white canvases—a pair of Rorschach blots representing herself and her late progenitor.

THE CRITIQUE
Photographer and performance artist Liz Cohen joins the judging panel this week, qualified to weigh in on the challenge because of her series of photographic self-portraits for which she posed semi-nude near automobiles (think: Indy 500 meets Laurel Nakadate). Dusty Mitchell and Young Sun are deemed safe for their fair-to-middling art.

Meanwhile, Sara Jimenez and Sarah Kabot are commended for their top-tier works—Ms. Jimenez, because her piece reminds gallerist/judge Bill Powers of Superman and because, according to critic/judge Jerry Saltz, “It’s like a flower arrangement meets an exploding crystal meets a backfire from a car.” (Now we know, very specifically, what to get Mr. Saltz for Christmas.) Ms. Kabot because… OK we don’t remember; we were distracted by Ms. Chow’s epically gross hair extensions, which have reached religious cult-mandated lengths. Ms. Jimenez wins the cash prize, which she will use to go to grad school and cry more.

The bottom-three contestants, “ended up spinning their wheels,” Mr. Saltz jibbed excruciatingly. Ms. Thompson has too many incoherent ideas, and Ms. Nawabi’s piece is literally broken, but it is Ms. Matson’s piece that, according to Mr. Powers—who has no regard for the fact that Ms. Matson’s was recently mowed down by a reckless driver—is “caught in the headlights,” so she’s kicked off.

Street art by Young Sun and Dusty

“Will you massage my vagina?” contestant Sara Jimenez asked of her (openly homosexual, for what it’s worth) fellow contestant Young Sun Han at the outset of the sixth episode of Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. Indeed, Bravo — after having made us pretty wary by moving Top Chef to Texas of all godforsaken places — definitively proved it had no shame left. Either that, or Work of Art had at long last begun dealing in “boundary”-pushing X-rated performance art more worthy of an LA MOCA gala than network television.

Before anyone could push “it” too far, however, the remaining artists were herded out to the wilds of non-Manhattan, where they were met by socialite/show-host China Chow, dressed like a marshmallow, and auctioneer/contestant-mentor Simon de Pury, who was, shockingly, costumed like an average human being. Mr. de Pury was in fact wearing his Brooklyn Suit™, which was no doubt still bespoke, but featured sneakers (“plimsoles,” back in the Old World) and jeans (“dungarees”/“peasant clothes”).

Our would-be artists were then commanded to craft their very own pieces of street art on vast stretches of brick wall. They would not work alone, but rather in random pairs designated by the color of spray-paint they selected and tested by tagging Ms. Chow’s gelatin-rich ensemble. Before Ms. Jimenez could snag the weekly prize for most lewd performance, the Sucklord spray-painted green nipples on the cowering Ms. Chow, which the secretly lascivious Mr. de Pury — sprung from the constricting moral confines of his usual pinstripes — bawdily encircled in more boobalicious spray paint.

“Simon is like the Sucklord with an ascot and class,” would-be-great artist Michelle Matson murmured, offering a rare moment of insight into the kind of art-world gentry that has historically yanked street art by its plimsole laces from the gutter to the auction block.
Finally, we learned that the winner of the street-art challenge would nab $30,000 from Blue Canvas magazine, which, given the general fiscal state of magazines today must either be a) a “magazine” in the other sense, of somewhere where vast quantities of goods are stored, including bricks of gold/cocaine, or b) some other kind of mob front.

THE SUCKLORD AND SARAH KABOT
The artistic duo decides to emblazon their section of the wall with a black-and-white maze, meant to evoke New York City’s labyrinthine aspects. Basically, the Sucklord is fatally distracted from his usual pursuit--the nympheticLola Thompson--by Ms. Kabot’s top-heavy form, and somehow deemed it a good idea to make a really big version of the background of the Pac Man game. When, during installation, the heavens open in a god-sent watery fury against bad art, Mr. Sucklord rails that it’s “just like you build this great thing and just something dumb happens and wipes it out,” which is exactly what Rome’s architect said the first time around, when he built his city with soluble glue.

KYMIA NAWABI AND SARA JIMENEZ
This pair of artistic collaborators is worried from the get-go, since both members usually make tiny, wishy-washy pieces. But the ladies discover they have something else in common. When Ms. Nawabi describes how her Iranian parents were forced to emigrate in 1979 because of the revolution, the Canadian-Philippine Ms. Jimenez vampirically mutters, “See, I like that.” So they whip up a mural featuring tree-people being uprooted by a creepy androgynous figure, who is smoking a cigarette and who thereby, according to Ms. Jimenez, symbolizes “bureaucratic systems.” “Well, it’s a guy in a business suit, so it’s ‘The Man,’” she explains, air quotes and all, to Mr. de Pury.

DUSTY MITCHELL AND YOUNG SUN HAN
In the greatest Disney Revelation of Shared Humanity Moment™ of season two thus far, Mr. Mitchell relates, “Me and Young come from different places. We have totally different life experiences. I’m married with a child; he’s got a boyfriend.” But does that impair their partnership? No, sir, it makes both artists stronger, and the super-team of rural-hick-meets-urban-gay-guy throws together a wall painting featuring their two profiles conversing about fatherhood. Mr. Han has just lost his father. Mr. Mitchell has recently become one. In between their own various graffitied daddy-issues they leave blank text bubbles on which viewers can tag their own parental problems. (Any time you want to write about the psychosexual legacy of your pseudo-pop Al Pacino, Lola, we’re ready.)

LOLA THOMPSON AND MICHELLE MATSON
Ah, the hipster babe squad has finally formed. “I’ve never gotten into trouble-making street art, but I’ve made a lot of renegade swings,” Lola confesseds, adding that she has been known to throw glitter at subways. All this twee contemporary crap can only lead to a mural of twee sexy tigers complete with cigarettes and smashed Champagne bottles and many-striped penises. The giggling, mean-girlish pair — who make Ms. Nawabi cry by denying her access to the scanners and then pasting big-cat penises on her mural about her familial flight from war-torn Iran — have “the most fun ever… penises are so much fun!” But they’re super gross about it, telling everyone that they can put their sex-offender-Tony-the-tiger-penis stickers “anywhere you want.”

THE CRITIQUE
Ms. Chow has changed into a jacket for which, by all appearances, Big Bird’s extended family had to perish. Critic/judge Jerry Saltz, meanwhile, is wearing a snap-up denim shirt, upon sight of which a whole family of TV costume designers dropped dead. Street artist Lee Quinones is in attendance as a guest judge, wearing normal clothes and sweating nervously, because his profession is illegal.

The panel commends Dusty Mitchell and Young Sun Han for their pretty nice mural, and praises Sara Jimenez and Kymia Nawabi for their equally OK piece. Of the two nice-ish pieces, Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Han’s wins, garnering the unlikely duo $30,000, which will be delivered as soon as “Blue Canvas Magazine” can extract the money from a World War II submarine at the bottom of the Atlantic. Mr. Han now has now secured a total of $35,000 from the “magazine,” which is obscene, and Dusty has now received enough money to make his wife pregnant (see: The Observer’s Work of Art Recap, Episode 5, subsection: ‘How Babies Are Made’).

Sarah Kabot and the Sucklord are reprimanded by the critical gaggle for their “conventional” and “boring” artwork, which according to Mr. Saltz screams “sleep as you walk past me,” and which according to gallerist/judge Bill Powers looks like it was made by someone who drinks white wine (99.99% of the art world). Lola Thompson and Michelle Matson fare only slightly better in the critical mêlée, reminding Mr. Quinones of the early 70s (and therefore “bland wallpaper”) and leading Mr. Saltz to spit out bile-drenched words like “gimmicky,” “kooky,” and “silly, canned surrealism.”

Ultimately, however, it’s the Sucklord who is sent packing. Ms. Chow is shocked that he didn’t produce better work for the street-art challenge — since, after all, he’s never wearing couture, is greasy, and therefore “should have felt right at home” in the mean byways of Brooklyn. Luckily, the Sucklord believes that he is the next great invincible artist, and cries, “If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!”

Richard Prince, Terry Richardson, James Frey (Photo courtesy Terry's Diary)

The line for the Terry Richardson show “MOM DAD” at Half Gallery on Friday was a clamoring, clustering thing, attractive people waving and desperate to squeeze into a space that, true to its name, isn’t very big. It was a bit like the opening of a nightclub, with everyone trying to be aloof and desperate at the same time, though there was very little order to it. Half Gallery owner Bill Powers came to the front from time to time and poked his pink sunglasses glasses around the door frame to point to people who were cool (e.g. “James!”—James Frey, of course).

Mr. Richardson’s parents are the subjects of the show and they are treated in much the same way as everyone else he photographs. His mother is topless giving a double thumbs up, his father has his arm around Mr. Richardson, who is in turn trying to look embarrassed. Near the back, large speakers played a series of voicemails from Mr. Richardson’s father Bob, a fashion photographer, who tells Terry that he's proud of him. On the floor of the gallery were crumpled school portraits, presumably of Mr. Richardson.

Mr. Richardson stood at the back of the room, his thumbs receiving a workout. Everyone wanted a photo with Terry. He had to take a break at one point to duck into the back. A short woman in flannel whined, “Oh man! It’s like when you’re waiting to take a picture on Santa’s lap and when you finally get to the front of the line he has to go to the bathroom.”

A theory: a photograph with Terry Richardson as your social media profile picture signifies countless sentiments about the man, nearly all of them positive. It could mean that you slept with him (he’s now taken! By the way), that you could have slept with him but at the time were too cool or famous to sleep with him. It could mean that you read Vice in its heyday, or even better, lived Vice in its heyday. It could mean that you “get” Terry Richardson, but are “over” him.

Why did you want a photo of him, girl in a fur vest angling her Blackberry?

“Oh,” she responded. “I work for Refinery 29.”

So that means you like Terry Richardson?

“No,” she said. “I have to tweet out a photo to prove to my boss that I came to this.”

A plebeian! Though the semiotics are admittedly complex. She asked where we worked and we told her.

“You should link out to us more.”

Even after you’d had a chance to see the show you had to stick around to watch the familiar faces standing in the street. There was Cynthia Rowley, Richard Prince, China Chow and Waris Ahluwalia. At one point the crowd parted so that Richard Phillips could drive by in his white Porsche, a racing model that sent rumbles down the block. We’d missed the dinner at Acme, but photos reveal that Ke$ha was there.

“The Terry images of his dad Bob remind me of the photographic study Richard Avedon made of his dying father,” Mr. Powers said after the show. “In fifty years, Terry Richardson will be remembered on the same level as a Helmut Newton, Irving Penn or Richard Avedon. It's hard for some people to recognize their contemporaries' importance in real time.”

Artist Rob Pruitt and critic Jerry Saltz. (Courtesy Bravo)

In this week’s installment of a certain Bravo reality television show, viewers nationwide were confronted with a fatal jet-skiing accident, sexual harassment, a discussion about the appropriate setting in which to consume a Pimm’s No. 1 Cup, and lots of boobs. Surprisingly enough, however, there were no real housewives involved. The television program of which I speak is actually Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, and thankfully a real artist (guest judge Rob Pruitt) dropped by before the hour ended and steered the show in the direction of, you know, ART, albeit for like 12 seconds.

The episode opened with the gaggle of remaining contestants trekking out to auction house Phillips de Pury & Company's hallowed halls, dubbed by would-be great-artist Young Sun Han “Simon’s Place.” (But don’t forget: We’re not talking about Run’s House. That’s a different show. This is a show about ART, not about aging hip-hop icons taking bubble baths.) Upon arriving in the empty exhibition space, the artists decided to follow a trail of tin cans laid out on the floor. Because that seemed logical, and, as the Sucklord put it, someone had to “braze the trail.”

And this turned out to be not such a bad—although highly idiomatically flawed—idea, as the cans led not only to contestant-mentor/auctioneer Simon de Pury and show-host/socialite China Chow (whose hair, by the way, is getting absurdly, creepy middle-school experiment long) but also to ART. Specifically, to what looked like Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can (Tomato) of 1962, but was in such a crappy frame, we’re betting money that it was a poster that everyone pretended was real.

“Pop is bold. Pop is brave. Pop is sex. Pop is life. Pop is fun. Pop is brash. Pop is political. So make it pop,” Mr. de Pury liltingly recited (inspired, perhaps, by Gagosian's 2007 "Pop Art Is" show), as he assigned the artists the task of creating their own pieces of Pop art. Without a doubt, Mr. de Pury has been boning up on his “Simplest Seuss for Youngest Use”—aka “Hop on Pop”—but he’s allowed, he just had a baby.

Other important things to know about this episode before I get down to mocking the almost entirely abysmal artworks are: 1) This was a double elimination challenge, so two people got booted off. 2) No one received immunity for the next challenge. 3) The winner of the challenge got a two-page spread in Entertainment Weekly, to be viewed by 11 million readers. If you are not aware of Entertainment Weekly, it’s the magazine that has less to do with art than all of the other magazines in the world.

THE SUCKLORD
The Sucklord sucks. His art this week is not as pathetic as everyone else’s: It’s an installation “based on Charlie Sheen’s ramblings” with bottles of tiger blood, jars of warlock dust, and dolls of action goddesses. The central action figure of Mr. Sheen has busted out of his packaging, leaving only the scrawled note, “I quit.” Very funny, Mr. Sucklord. But still, he sucks. Because he’s just another misogynistic asshole on television, not unlike Mr. Sheen himself. The main revelation of this episode is that the Sucklord has a girlfriend, who’s “literally going to cut his balls off” when she sees the show, and with whom he previously “had a lot of sex adventures.” Neither of these facts, however, stop him from repeatedly asking Lola Thompson to take her clothes off, from trying to corner her physically while stating that he’s getting turned on, from commenting to Kymia Nawabi that she has “nice tits,” or from lamenting the fact that it’s not the bustier Sarah Kabot taking off her shirt in the name of art. But of course none of this televised harassment matters, because Mr. de Pury, a collector of the Sucklord’s work, likes the Sheen-ian art.

LOLA THOMPSON
Ms. Thompson, who to the chagrin of all women everywhere, encourages the Sucklord’s advances because she’s “single and lonely,” whips up a sculpture featuring overly large PDA devices displaying text messages along the lines of “Click to unfriend Mubarak.” Because the only thing that excites her more than the slimy advances of the Sucklord is overthrowing dictators.

TEWZ
Tewz “grew up on Nintendo,” so he gets pop culture, dig? He recreates a life-size tail end of a “FadEx” truck that he then tags. But what’s really important is his back-story, most notably the time he spent in a maximum-security jail after he was caught spray-painting a highway sign. (So he’s not the stealthiest street artist, sure.) “Art basically saved my ass…. literally,” he says, while laughing nervously and shifting in his seat. If that’s not enough gratuitous, irrelevant information for you, by the end of episode three he’s also revealed that he masturbates with his left hand.

KYMIA NAWABI
“Pop art to me is about art that reels you in and tries to sell you something but has also a message within the piece,” Ms. Nawabi explains. How exactly this definition differs from that of “art” in general, is not clear. Another thing that is not clear is how much nudity you can show on TV. Because Ms. Nawabi photographs her boobs, and while she’s in a state of undress, her bazooms are blurred out. But once they’re printed in their full photographic splendor, it’s just high-resolution nipple all over the place. Her piece of environmental commentary/mammary-art depicts her breasts and a water bottle filled with garbage. It also has something to do with her severe social anxiety disorder, which stems from the moment she failed to seek help after finding her dead father floating in water, the victim of a freak jet-skiing accident. Back to art, though. “It is something that you could see possibly in a subway station so that’s a good thing,” declares Mr. de Pury of the piece. What?

DUSTY MITCHELL
Mr. Mitchell is just a really sad character, least of all because of his blindingly bad haircut. “Fast food’s always a popular culture topic and it’s kind of a personal subject because my father’s had a heart attack more than once,” he reveals, in his down-and-out, Droopy-the-dog manner. For the challenge, he constructs a streamlined white trash can (insert your own white-trash can joke here, I just don’t have the spirit), with the words “How Could You?” emblazoned across the flap. “I don’t think it would look good in Entertainment Weekly,” Mr. de Pury says delicately. The last time that was someone's creative goal was the most recent time that Daniel Radcliffe mulled which button-down to wear out of the house.

LEON LIM
Mr. Lim makes everybody look stupid, per usual, by proving that no one knows anything about the American flag (e.g. distribution of stripes). But then he crafts a kind of Jasper Johns-ian spread of flags, out of which sprout McDonald’s and Facebook and Twitter logos. “I’m not making art just to make the judges happy,” he states early on in the episode, sounding his own death knell.

SARA JIMENEZ
Even though she’s in a committed relationship with a really tall guy and has never been on a dating site, Ms. Jimenez pulls together a piece about online dating, for which she egomaniacally takes MySpace-ian photos of herself mugging and grimacing.

BAYETÉ ROSS SMITH
Having settled on the theme of “identity” once again, Mr. Smith melds the faces of his fellow non-white contestants, Ms. Jimenez (whom he ambiguously dubs “part-Asian”) and Ms. Nawabi, who is Iranian and also part Russian. The resulting photographs look like extreme close-ups of a dark-haired woman with freckles. Very avant-garde.

JAZZ-MINH MOORE
This poor little hippie never even had a TV growing up (gasp… how did she learn about reality?) so she didn’t know “what was on the commercials.” How, then, could she possibly be expected to figure out Pop art? I mean, she got a BFA and then an MFA, but her professors must not have mentioned this piddling, lesser movement of art history. Mr. de Pury is less interested in any of her artistic inclinations than he is in her inner-lip tattoo, which reads, “Bite Me.” I myself don’t know whether to be more interested in the fact that her obviously cruel parents named her white sister Asia, or the fact that Asia was stupid enough to have “Epic as Fuck” tattooed inside her own lip. Ms. Moore’s two self-portrait photographs are really bad, and are supposed to be about Britney Spears. The Sucklord spills paint on one and she doesn’t even bother to reprint it, because she’s a hippie and painting is “about forces that are beyond control” in hippie-land.

MICHELLE MATSON
Ms. Matson re-envisions a Warhol Coke bottle, but it’s on an iPhone, and it’s a can, and it’s Coke Zero, which only Europeans drink, but none of that matters because Mr. de Pury is correct in guessing that everyone thinks it’s “too derivative.”

SARAH KABOT
“Sorry We’re Closed,” reads Ms. Kabot’s delicate and quite lovely hanging text piece. Less lovely is her analysis of the foreclosure crisis. “It’s a huge problem,” she earnestly explains.

YOUNG SUN HAN
Mr. Han builds a well-crafted pink billboard featuring the words “PROP 8,” on the back of which gallerygoers can inscribe their feelings about the contentious California legislation.

THE CRIT
First, and most importantly, gallerist/TV-judge Bill Powers has resurrected his yellow-striped sweater, a staple of season-one critiques, except this time it looks like it actually fits him! Like it grew! Or he shrank! Or like he listened to certain nagging art bloggers (ehem) and had a stern speaking-to with his dry cleaners.

Oh, but, ART. Mr. Pruitt—most recently of The Andy Monument sculpture fame in New York—finally offers a working, and quite eloquent, definition of Pop art: “Good Pop art takes our collective experience and filters it through a personal lens.” He then helps tap this week’s top artists, Young Sun Han and Kymia Nawabi. Young actually wins because, as Ms. Chow self-evidently puts it, Prop 8 “is such a political-social issue right now.” For some reason, judge/art-critic Jerry Saltz deems that Ms. Nawabi’s work is not a “gratuitous piece of nudity.” (It’s a third nipple that would have really thrown it over the edge.)

The worst pieces belong to Dusty Mitchell, Jazz-Minh Moore, Michelle Matson and Leon Lim. Poor ole Mr. Mitchell is bashed by Mr. Powers, who declares that gallerygoers “just walked right by this thing.” (Ten bucks says there was at least one plastic wine glass at the bottom of it by the end of the night—How Could You?) Ms. Moore is schooled by Mr. Pruitt for having created a work that “fails for the viewer because we can’t decipher the meaning” (the meaning being Britney Spears). Everyone berates Ms. Matson for not being creative enough, and her defense is that she’s a “huge fan of wallpaper.”

Hilariously, Mr. Powers tries to explain why he thinks Mr. Lim would be grateful for Facebook, being deaf and all. Then Mr. Saltz lets loose the most searingly mordant barb of the season thus far. “The most startling thing about this piece is how uninteresting it is,” Saltz slings. Obviously, Mr. Lim gets booted off, along with Jazz-Minh Moore. Click to unfriend Jazz-Minh Moore and Leon Lim. Comment: Bite Me.

On episode two, Michelle crafted a wood-frame person, the testicles of which you can tug to give it a sculptural erection.

When I say, “motion,” you say, “Poop! Semen! Intestinal gore! Erections! Puke!” Usually, that kind of response would be worrying. I’d suggest that you seek professional help. I’d perhaps start filling out paperwork to acquire a restraining order. That is, unless you then revealed that you were an artist. In that case, I’d recommend you get yourself onto the cast of a reality television show, stat. For you, my gutter-minded reader, have the makings not merely of a good artist, but of the Next Great One.

But let’s backtrack, way back, to the dawn of episode two of the second season of Bravo’s “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.” It is, literally, dawn (6:30 in the morning) and auctioneer/contestant mentor Simon de Pury is rousing the remaining 13 artists by menacingly murmuring “wake-y wake-y.” Because Mr. de Pury has never adjusted to the time difference between his European fiefdom and the isle of Manhattan, he looks bright-eyed and impeccably besuited, even at this godforsaken hour.

The bleary artists blindly follow their leader to some kind of outdoor plaza, where “Work of Art” host/socialite/”jewelry designer” China Chow is wearing what appears to be a Pac Man costume. Soon some ninjas arrive, back-flipping and front-flipping all over the place. It’s entirely possible that such shenanigans always take place at 6:30 in the morning, hours before the art-world alarm clock artfully beeps at a quarter past ten, but who’s to say.

“I’m sure you weren’t expecting to see this when you woke up this morning,” Ms. Chow ominously intones, probably referring to her giant yellow tent of a sweater. Anyway, it turns out the ninjas are not ninjas at all (yawn) but rather members of New York Parkour, “first and official home of Parkour in the New York New Jersey and the surrounding Metro area,” according to their website.

No one on the show ever explains what Parkour is — I would have guessed a kind of French parka sported by Mr. de Pury on his annual snowshoeing holiday — but someone named “Oasis” has helpfully defined it on the troupe’s site as, “an art developed to help you navigate your environment from one point to another, using the capabilities of the human body.”

“You won’t catch me doing that sh**,” the contestant known as the Sucklord mutters, little knowing that excrement comprises much of what he’ll be doing in the subsequent hours. The artists are split into two teams, tasked with preparing two separate “exhibitions,” each of which will present a coherent piece about movement, made up of individual works by the artists.
Does that make sense? It makes about as much sense as “an art developed to help you navigate your environment from one point to another, using the capabilities of the human body” (we call that walking, right?). Also the artists are supposed to start things off by taking a very brief stroll through New York to find inspiration for the challenge, because otherwise it would be too straightforward.

TEAM 1

Members of team one include the Sucklord, Dusty Mitchell, Bayeté Ross Smith, Sara Jimenez, Michelle Matson, Kymia Nawabi, and Sarah Kabot. Michelle wants to do “a pooping piece.” “When you’re attracted to pooping, what is it… the thing coming out?” the Sucklord asks incredulously. “No I like the actual poop,” Michelle replies, in her eerie, wide-eyed way. “You like the physical sh**,” the Sucklord says, sounding a little too intrigued. Then he says something like “bleep bleep bleep eating bleep bleep.”

The team’s highbrow, art-theory-laden discussion complete, each member picks a part of the digestive process to represent. Describing the end of said process to a disgusted-looking Mr. de Pury, who has dropped in to check on their progress, Kymia says the art will get “shat out.” And the word does not get bleeped out. (Maybe this is because “shat” also served as a term of endearment when referring to an Irish person in the 17th century? Bravo probably consulted the OED on that one.)

Simon expresses his concerns with the project, pointing out that, as he sees it, pooping is something that happens in “very, very slow motion.” Too much information, Mr. de Pury.

TEAM 2

The second team consists of Young Sun Han, Lola Thompson, Leon Lim, Tewz, Jazz-Minh Moore, and Kathryn Parker Almanas. Young confides early on, “Before I came to this competition I worked as a curator in New Zealand, so I have a lot of experience with this sort of thing.” What exactly is “this sort of thing?” And what exactly is going on in the New Zealand art world these days?

“Look at Jazz-Minh,” someone on the team gasps, “she’s the sh**.” Well, not in the, you know, “physical sense.” She’s just done a front handspring. That inspires team two to make a work about migration. This decision leads them to collect garbage (physical shit) from the streets of New York to use in their piece. This is a real thrill for Leon, because, as he reveals, all he ever wanted to do in Malaysia was pick up garbage but his parents wouldn’t let him. “That was one of the reasons I moved to the United States,” he says.

And the revelations just keep on coming, as we learn that Kathryn has some kind of digestive disorder, the name of which was not entirely clear but which sounds, not to be too rude, like “Prawns Disease.” [ED. NOTE: A reader has helpfully informed us that this is Crohn's Disease, and that Ms. Parker knew she had it before she entered the competition.] She’s decided to make her usually bloody guts photography, while Young’s going to do something about North and South Korea, Lola’s planning to make a work that addresses the phases of the moon, Jazz-Minh’s going to engage in some kind of gymnastics, and Tewz and Leon will depict the aftermath of domestic conflict. In response to all of this, Mr. de Pury freaks out in a very well mannered way and suggests that both teams start from scratch.

In a confessional interview, Leon signs, “Simon says it’s a complete failure.” Then, in sign language, he exclaims, “Motherf*#%er.” This gesture is blurred out. But still, it’s OK to say “shat.”

BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD

TEAM 1/SECOND ATTEMPT

The first team agrees on a kind of amusement park/playground theme, for an installation they have dubbed “Play With Me.” To address this topic Michelle crafts a wood-frame person, the testicles of which you can tug to give it a sculptural erection. Kymia makes a clay cast of her tongue that bobs up and down over a pile of brown lumps and plaster fingers. Bayeté films himself spinning around and around on a rooftop. Dusty cutely misses his wife and so feels inspired to build a see-saw, on one end of which is perched a life-size photograph of Dusty. Sara J. makes a little clay girl with a creepy carved vagina sitting on a wooden swing and Sarah K. makes some kind of minimal toothpick thing that would resemble a rollercoaster if you’d never seen a rollercoaster. The Sucklord puts together a carnival attraction, wherein you can launch rubber rats at targets.

“I want to play your game,” Lola says of the Sucklord’s rat-toss in a grating baby voice. “You’ll get to play when it’s ready,” he replies grossly, even more grossly adding, “It’s dirty.

TEAM 2/SECOND ATTEMPT

Young tries to take charge of the team’s second go-round at movement-inspired art. Unfortunately, while Leon is throwing out a bad idea — to have everyone make work about circles — Lola decides to stand up for the deaf guy, yelling, “We have to let Leon finish talking because, please, he doesn’t, he can’t, doesn’t, have a voice.” So, that’s that: the project is called “loop” and “it’s about balls.”

Things get worse for the team when the sickly Kathryn declares, “I’m just not feeling well,” so hers “won’t be an exact circle.” No, it will be more bloody organs, this time filmed while being dropped from a height onto plastic. Young’s piece is a silver version of the Japanese flag. Tewz, recognizing that a bucket is round, wraps a hose around a bucket and then affixes some plastic hands to a circle on the wall. Lola covers a big orb of shredded paper in hot glue, while screaming, “I’m double fisting it with hot glue guns… it’s so semen-like.” The Sucklord observes her, lustily.

Leon is the only person making art that actually moves — he crafts a moody tableau, with a swinging light bulb suspended in front of a broken pane of glass. Oh, and Jazz-Minh sticks a photograph of her front-handspring from earlier in the episode onto a piece of wood.

THE CRITIQUE

The judges do their usual stalk around the room, with this week’s guest, the gallerist Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who was a judge on season one. China Chow is wearing a pillow-case toga, which looks like it’s covered in wine stains, probably from when the judging panel was pre-gaming the crit. Ms. Rohatyn dubs Sarah K.’s piece “a ride… a ride that you do with your eye.” It looks like the Sucklord slips Bill Powers a dollar bill as a bribe to hide in his hair with all of the other bribes he’s received over the years. Mr. Powers then slightly too gleefully watches Ms. Chow stimulating the erection sculpture.

“Play With Me” beats “Loop,” and the judges single out Bayeté’s dizzying video and Michelle’s nad-groping art as the top two individual pieces. Of Michelle’s work, Jerry Saltz — who is clearly feeling spicy, as evidenced by his purple shirt — says of the penis-pumping piece, “You took the idea of movement and went inside with it.” Mr. Powers adds that “it was uncomfortable in a fun way to engage with it, be close to someone activating the piece.” Ms. Chow, not to be outdone, declares, “I’m not scared of the erection. It’s funny that the females seem more comfortable than the men do.”

The purple-shirt-sporting Mr. Saltz of course takes this as a challenge, and promptly jerks some wooden balls, proclaiming “There!” thereby dealing a searing blow to potential gender inequity on national television. However much people love erections, however, it turns out they love nauseating video loops more, so Bayeté wins. “It’s kind of hard to pin down,” Ms. Rohatyn says of the footage of a man spinning around.

The judging panel admonishes the entire losing team for choosing to make art about circles — “that’s like saying we’re just going to have the theme be paint,” Mr. Powers groans. But the three worst works came courtesy of Lola, Tewz, and Kathryn. Even with Halloween fast approaching, and even with her recently revealed mystery illness adding some intrigue to her reality-TV personality, Kathryn’s gore-filled film turns out to be the biggest loser of them all.

When Mr. Saltz dryly proclaims, “this work looks uncannily like the work you did last week,” Kathryn starts wailing, really weeping, and making hyena-like barking noises.  Mr. Saltz can’t decide whether to laugh or pat her shoulder, but Ms. Chow tries to sound nice. “Bye, Kathryn, feel better,” she drones robotically. As a catch-phrase, it doesn’t quite have the oomph of Heidi Klum’s auf weidersehen, but it did the job — Kathryn will have to Parkour it all the way back to Brooklyn.

The contestant on "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist." (Photo courtesy Bravo)

If you don’t already know the Bravo reality television show Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, it’s because you a) don’t live in the real world, and so have never heretofore encountered reality, or b) hate joy and astounding things like art and executive producer Sarah Jessica Parker’s tiny torso, or c) don’t own a TV, because you’re one of those people. But FYI, the second season of Work of Art premiered Wednesday night, and if you’re ready to jump on in for round two of the self-referential, critical/gladiatorial brawl, I’m here to offer you a week-by-week primer on what transpired. Because, you know, sometimes reality television can be confusing without someone there to break it down for you.

Let me begin by explaining that since the dawn of civilization, great artists have been selected by a gaggle of intelligentsia, anointed with a special power to separate the wheat from the non-artistic chaff, the arty crème from the rest of the crème. One of these elect few is China Chow (OK, maybe the word intelligentsia is a bit of a stretch in this case). She’s our “host” on Work of Art, and claims to be a “jewelry designer” like everyone else without a real job. Also, as a child, she doodled with Jean-Michel Basquiat—“a family friend,” according to the Bravo website.

Then there’s Simon de Pury, chairman of the Phillips de Pury & Company auction house, who hails from some European land where people communicate with suave half-words and sweeping gestures of the bespoke-besuited arm. He’s the “mentor” of the 14 contestants that each year are chosen to tremble before the judgment of Ms. Chow, Mr. de Pury, bespectacled New York magazine senior art critic Jerry Saltz, and Half Gallery co-owner Bill Powers, whose hair grows daily more vertiginous, the better to hide art secrets in. There used to be a lady gallerist named Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn up high on TV-art-judge Olympus, but she disappeared.

Anyway, each week the aforementioned trembling artists are handed down a challenge, which they must meet by hastily making mediocre art, in an attempt to keep the ireful judges from throwing them back to the other “real” art world—the one that exists on days other than Wednesdays and outside of the box that you can turn on and off. The winner at the end of the season receives a solo show at the “world famous” Brooklyn Museum (oh, you haven’t heard of it? It’s that big building near the library with all the parties!), a cover story in Blue Canvas magazine (don’t ask me), and $100,000 coughed up by the Fiat 500 (expect everyone on the show to drive Fiats, although if I had to hazard a guess, Mr. de Pury drives around his fiefdom in something more like a solid-gold chariot on his days off).

Episode one heralded the “bad art” challenge, in which the artists were presented with kitschy, thrift-store artwork, and told to make it better. Let me clarify: artists were told to do anything, anything at all, to improve upon crap. Some of them succeeded, sort of. But before I tell you who did OK, and whose stuffed head now hangs above Saltz’s hearth, here are the contestants:

KYMIA NAWABI
This Iranian-American artist reveals right off the bat that she has a “dark interior,” and that she chose a creative career over dentistry, because if you’re a dentist, you can’t do awesome, arty things like be on a reality television show. (Truth be told, dentists are in fact the ones with the darkest of dark interiors and Bravo very well might be developing a Real Dentists of Toronto series as we speak—maybe she has time to reconsider her career path?) Kymia crafted a clay spaghetti monster cradling a tiny spaghetti monster as her first artwork. Saltz lavished it with praise, decreeing, “It’s “more than a tchotchke.”

THE SUCKLORD
“The name Sucklord comes from the suckiness, which is my self-deprecating misanthropic side, and then the lord, which is my megalomaniacal self-aggrandizing side—together in one word,” the Sucklord informs us in the first episode. He is known for making art from toy Stormtroopers, the ones from Star Wars—and not, you know, the Germans in the trenches of World War I. I’m guessing that since Mr. de Pury already owns some of the Sucklord’s art, he can’t get kicked off for a while, lest the value of said art should depreciate. He made a really horrible Sculpey Gandalf figurine for the first challenge. At least the moniker is apt.

DUSTY MITCHELL
Dusty’s a hick with a mullet (or a mullet in the back, plus hair that’s kind of receding in the front), but it’s hard to enjoy making fun of him because he’s from Arkansas and teaches art in a public elementary school. Also, he just had a baby. In addition, during the episode they show footage from his hometown, and it looks just like those creepy videos Charles Manson made of all the kids in the Family taking acid. So maybe Mitchell deserves a break. Even though he created a so-so, Technicolor self-portrait-as-clown for the “bad art” challenge.

UGO NONIS
Ugo is French. When he speaks with Mr. de Pury, their accents meld into a super-accent. He rips off Keith Haring constantly (and consistently!), which everyone repeatedly tells him is a bad idea, but maybe he doesn’t understand what they’re saying. Because he’s French? He’s clearly supposed to be the hunky eye candy on the show, but on the sexiness scale, he’s no sleepy-eyed Miles—season one shout out! In response to the first challenge, Ugo constructs a red Keith Haring-esque thing. Surprise!

LEON LIM
“Leon has been profoundly and proudly deaf since birth,” Bravo declares on its website. I am profoundly not sure what that means, but talk about taking all the fun out of mocking someone. So instead, I’ll talk about Bill, Leon’s interpreter. Bill sounds just like an aging musical theater producer, kind of lisping and flippant and New Yawk all at once—basically he does not sound like a 31-year-old Malaysian dude. But back to Leon, who made some kind of spooky black-and-white mirror with a paper wreath on it in response to the inaugural challenge, and made it in order to elevate the status of all deaf artists in Malaysia, a minority Bravo viewers had probably not given much thought to previously. So, there, haters.

KATHRYN PARKER ALMANAS
Kathryn has an MFA in photography from Yale, meaning that she’s already survived years of scathing censure, so she should be safely desensitized to meanies. But if she’s not, the totally gross photos she makes of things that look like bloody guts (and yeah, sometimes genitalia) will certainly eventually earn her some acerbic critiques.

SARAH KABOT
Sarah’s… perky. She’s an installation artist and a professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art. For this episode, she cut a porcelain cat into slivers for the challenge and tacked them to the wall. People love cats. I mean, cat people do. So she’s got that.

MICHELLE MATSON
Most notably, Michelle and her boyfriend were recently the victims of a hit-and-run accident. Drama! “Since the accident, I’m always thinking about death,” she reveals in her hiply nerdy monotone. For the first challenge, she displayed a clay totem pole in front of a painting of clouds, toward all of which a paper skeleton crawls. It was very Oliver Stone’s The Doors. Michelle confides before the crit, “I haven’t been this nervous since I got tested for STDS.” Not even when you got mowed down by a car, Ms. Matson?

TEWZ
Here’s the graffiti artist. He boasts that he’s gotten caught and locked up in Chicago for his street-art shenanigans. He proclaims that, “Art on the street and art in the gallery is really emerging together,” unlike the subject and verb pairing in that sentence. He’s shocked when he enters the studio in which the artists do their art-making. Poor guy’s used to abandoned warehouses and, like, jail. In response to the challenge, he cobbles together a horrifying frog that lights up and looks a little like a homemade bomb, much to Powers’ light-up-frog-loving delight.

SARA JIMENEZ
Having battled with bulimia in high school (relevant, how?) she now makes art that she thinks is about “womanhood.” More importantly, she is the second Sara—albeit without an “h”—on this show currently. This insanity must end! Either she or Sarah must change her name to something else, like Sucklady, or maybe Threez. I decree it. This Sara painted a woman who looks kind of like her (read: has freckles) roasting on a spit.

BAYETÉ ROSS SMITH
Smith is the black artist. The only one on the show, therefore the only one who could possibly be a great artist. In the season premiere, he produces an artwork that is, as he put it, about “cultural hybridity and commodification of beauty.” It’s the faces of two ladies—one black, one white—surrounded by money, the whole shebang behind bars. Oy, Bravo, there are female artists out there not making self-portraits about their weight issues (“womanhood”?) and black artists not making work about race that’s so facile. Come on!

JAZZ-MINH MOORE
With a first name like that, how could she not have grown up on a hippie commune. Her claim to fame is that she paints fast—a real boon in this context—which she proceeds to do in the first episode, cranking out a bad picture of Lola with a cartoon bird. There’s a Maya Angelou reference in its title, if you care to gag a little.

LOLA THOMPSON
Lola is the 24-year-old nymphette, or in Moore’s words, the “sprightly sexpot” of the show. The Sucklord is already totally trying to get in her high-waisted shorts. She claims her mom was a “gypsy” moving around a lot, but her mom—as seen in a photo that flashes onscreen—looks mostly like Courtney Love. (Maybe a gypsy is preferable?) Ms. Thompson’s piece turns out well, against all odds: it’s a kind of deconstructed painting of a cottage in the mountains, with the cottage, mountains and setting all isolated from one another. The lonely Courtney Love cottage makes everyone sad.

YOUNG SUN HAN
Supposedly Young Sun Han was the top-dog of the art world in… New Zealand, back when he was making photographs of himself naked and soaking wet in front of his terminally ill parents. Ick. “Instead of having brothers and sisters to play with I had my imagination,” he says of his artistic beginnings. For the first challenge, he imagined a performative installation of dogs playing poker. It’s titled The Things We Said When We Had Too Much To Drink, which I think would make a great alternate title for just about any Bravo reality television show.

THE CRIT
Finally. If you’re still watching, you can now watch (read) what happens. Our intelligentsia and photographer Mary Ellen Mark (guest judge, dressed like she’s wearing a Willie Nelson Halloween costume… timely, but still scary) select Sara J., Michelle, and Lola as the top three contenders, and Bayeté, Ugo, and the Sucklord as the bottom three. Michelle wins and is “super duper” excited. Bayeté and Mr. Saltz get in a fight about pushing buttons (both in favor, depending on the button, and frequency of pushing). According to Mr. Saltz, the Sucklord’s piece “is not art.” Ugo is told by everyone, even Ms. Chow, that he ripped off Keith Haring. Ugo proceeds to look sad, and China Chow looks lustfully after Ugo as he leaves. Because, yes, Ugo has been eliminated. And no one even said, “Ugo, you go!” They must not be as drunk as I thought.

Check back on Wednesday for a print feature on what this week’s episode would have taught us about art and the art world, if Bravo was our only access to those things. We'll be back here next week, following episode two, recapping the action.

"He became known as the man of a thousand lies," said magician Derek DelGaudio at the Kitchen last night, explaining that Marco Polo's compatriots back home found his tales of the East to be unbelievable. This was all prelude to a magic act, or performance piece, listed in the program as "A Walk Through China."

"We wanted to offer people that sort of journey and we realized that we couldn't afford to take everyone to China, so we did the next best thing," Mr. DelGaudio continued, his partner, the artist Glenn Kaino standing at his side. "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome China Chow."

It was the climax of an half-hour performance dedicated to tromp l'oeil by Mr. DelGaudio and Mr. Kaino, who together call themselves A.Bandit and did things like bobble a basketball between their hands under a strobe light, calling it "Jeff Koons's famous floating basketball trick."

Ms. Chow was all business. In a dark glittery outfit, the actress, model and Work of Art host strode out of the audience's front row and placed an arm on each of their shoulders. All three sang the opening beats of Europe's "The Final Countdown," replacing the '80s synthesizer with the word "do" (e.g. "do do do, do do do do").

A record scratched over the speakers and the song began in earnest. ("We're taking it back," Mr. DelGaudio explained after the performance, referencing the fact that the song is soundtrack to a bumbling magician's illusions on Arrested Development.) Mr. Kaino pulled a sheet off an object at the back of the stage, one of those infamous mini-coffins built for the express purpose of separating a woman's upper and lower portions. It was on a little table with wheels.

The trick is called "sawing a woman in half," but there's actually no saw, just two large metal dividers used to separate the halves. Over the booming Europe, you could still hear Ms. Chow shriek briefly as the divider was inserted into the lower portion. Mr. DelGaudio had some trouble with the upper divider, though, so Mr. Kaino pulled Ms. Chow's head, and her presumably legless torso, higher in the box. The second divider slid into its possession. Many audience members were held rapt by the proceedings. As it had not throughout the rest of the performance, the expression on the face of of Ms. Chow's godfather David Byrne did not change.

Mr. DelGaudio and Mr. Kaino pulled Ms. Chow to opposite ends of the stage to hearty applause. Mr. Kaino then pulled a sheet off another object onstage, a booth containing DJ Rhettmatic, who had apparently been there the entire time.

"Ladies and gentlemen, please stand up," DJ Rhettmatic said into his microphone. "We ask you to walk through China, and while you're at it, grab a beer." There were beers in red coolers at the back of the stage. "Everybody up there come on down. Don't be afraid. Grab a beer, too."

Everyone obliged and DJ Rhettmatic spun something upbeat. A brief party was held between Ms. Chow's halves. After a while she was reassembled, and she emerged from the coffin in a completely new, rainbow-colored outfit. When we caught up with her she said she was getting better at the trick, especially the changing in a coffin part. They first performed it earlier this year at the opening for Laxart's Annex gallery in Hollywood. The two magicians had proposed the piece, complete with the title A Walk Through China, after they'd all met at the Magic Castle.  She agreed to do it, sight unseen.

"Then I saw the box," she told Gallerist, glancing over at it onstage. "And I started sweating. I said to myself, 'Oh my God, who else do I know who's named China?'"