Forrest Bess, 'Here is a sign,' ca. 1970. (Courtesy Contemporary Art Center)

"Well, that was a scary 24 hours and a journey into FB hell," wrote New York critic Jerry Saltz on a Facebook post this morning. "Facebook deleted the picture I posted from the Whitney Biennial for Forest Bess's self-surgery on his genitals. I couldn't see my own page, couldn't get access. Pfft. Just like that."

Then Mr. Saltz, whose Facebook life we've documented in the past, was apparently asked to answer some Facebook security questions by "naming the people in these photographs." He was unable to do that because he said, "Well, SO MANY PEOPLE POST PICTURES on my page (and I never delete them) that the pictures the system generated were totally foreign to me."

Mr. Saltz failed a second time and would have been kicked off Facebook permanently (check out Gawker's review of Facebook's policies with respect to objectionable images here) to the great chagrin of his legions of followers and friends in the art world (5,000 friends, as of this post, to be exact—the facebook limit—with his pending-friend-request limit maxed out!) had it not been a picture of three artists formerly on Work of Art, the Bravo show on which Mr. Saltz serves as a judge: Peregrine Honig, Young Sun Han and Michelle Matson.

"Peregrine, Young, and Michelle, I ♥ you," Mr. Saltz said in conclusion. "Thank you. I am sorry I did not give you $100,000. But I.O.U. Saved by of all things that strange strange reality tv gameshow about art....So, hi. I'm back."

Hi, back at you, Mr. Saltz. We're glad you're back. And for everyone else, here's what Facebook "saved" you from seeing.

Forrest Bess.

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.

It was, therefore, with some relief that we watched last week’s episode of Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, which revealed that the art world is a macrocosm of Macy’s on Black Friday—it’s filled with spiteful, backstabbing people who are driven to unspeakable acts in the name of money and brand loyalty. Bravo reminded us that, 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.

WEEK SIX: In which we learned that during the process of ascending to that higher plane on which great artists dwell, fledgling creatives must please not only ornery critics, tall-haired gallerists, couture-clad socialites, and lispingly patrician auctioneers—but also car manufacturers.

SUMMARY: On the seventh episode of our reality-TV romp through the genesis of great art, the contestants were challenged with making works that incorporated Fiat car parts. They were told that by making art about automobiles—in particular, the automobiles manufactured by the sponsors of the show they were on—they followed in the footsteps of past great artists Richard Prince and John Chamberlain. (This is like saying that by writing words I am following in the footsteps of Martin Heidegger and Chelsea Handler.)

Having discarded the silly notion that artists will create work without a large cash prize, the show hosts assured their charges that the winner would receive $25,000, furnished by the Italian carmaker. The harried contestants then crafted droopy robots, nonfunctioning kaleidoscopes, exploding mufflers, and leather Rorschach blots. It was the exploding muffler that drove it home for the judges, earning Sara Jimenez a win; Michelle Matson, meanwhile, was given the boot, for what appeared to be a goofy homage to Disney/Pixar’s Cars franchise.

LESSON: Bravo’s scholars of reality have once again brought to light an important fact: often the art world hides its corporate ties, keeps its billionaire oligarchs behind a curtain that is swept aside only when it comes to pick up the fat checks (and whatever advice, solicited or not, that might accompany them).

Consider David H. Koch, one of the shady brothers who subsidized the fledgling Tea Party: he’s a Metropolitan Museum trustee, and just last year made a $10 million pledge to that institution. Or recall the “Skin Fruit” exhibition of Dakis Joannou’s art at the New Museum, or the Guggenheim Bilbao show of Dimitris Daskalopoulos’s collection, in both of which cases a major benefactor’s personal taste determined the art on view in a museum he partly bankrolls.

So the professorial types at Work of Art took it upon themselves to serve up a Hans Haacke-style systems lesson: when it comes to mega-donor or corporate sponsorship of the arts, the Man generally expects to get something in return for his creative patronage. In the case of our little show, this was a gaggle of artists employing their talents to transform car parts into rarefied pieces of art, with tastemakers of the art world then rating the works based on how well the car parts were incorporated—as if this had always been a prerequisite of good art.

“I like how this challenge is so open like you could do whatever you want,” Ms. Matson said, acting as so many artists have throughout history, and buttering up her patrons. When The Observer spoke to her after the show, however, and asked if she didn’t, in the end, think there might be something limiting about the task of making art to suit the automotive-manufacturing sponsors of the reality show you’re on, she replied, “In the back of my mind there was always the thought of, ‘Oh, shit. I can’t let on that I hate cars …’”

CONCLUSION: The only thing more valuable than the deals we got on Black Friday is the lesson that, in an art world financed by business magnates and corporations, it’s important to understand who decides which artists become great, and which are eliminated from the running. Especially if the corporation in question happens to be one of the carmakers that once built vehicles for Mussolini and the Nazis, and now hosts authorized production facilities in North Korea and Pakistan.

editorial@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.

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

Oh, O.K., fine, if you insist on twisting The Observer’s arm, we’ll admit it: sometimes the shtick of this column—which posits that one can learn absolutely all there is to know about the state of contemporary art today by watching an art-themed reality television show—is flawed.

Yes, on rare and shocking occasions, the gray-bearded academics at Bravo’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist miss the mark in their sage sorties into the wilds of art today. For instance, not all “jewelry designing” socialites are as qualified as show-host/judge China Chow to anoint the next great artist with a tap of their bedazzled swords. Nor can all artists be separated from Al Pacino and/or lethal jet-skiing accidents by fewer than six degrees. Moreover, it is certain that not all art critics hate Star Wars as much as New York magazine’s Jerry Saltz.

So Work of Art is not a perfect microcosm. But the show retains moments of incredible insight into the machinations of the current art scene, served up by Bravo’s tenured professors. For instance, in the case of the latest episode, Mr. Saltz, Ms. Chow, their fellow judges and young competitors provided a lucid look at street art’s present dual status: as naughty, lawbreaking stepchild and radiant, bajillions-of-dollars-earning firstborn.

WEEK SIX: In which we learn that these days street art is mostly made over the course of many daytime hours, in full view of joggers and the police.

SUMMARY: Our remaining contestants were broken up into pairs and told to emblazon blank brick walls with “street art.” Because they were in Brooklyn—that outer borough to which, apparently, the longish arm of the law has not yet reached—the non-law-abiding artists did not bother to go incognito. The judges, meanwhile, changed into their plebeian clothes, which for Mr. Saltz and artist-mentor/auctioneer Simon de Pury entailed being swaddled in swaths of denim, and left China Chow alternately dressed like a marshmallow and a Muppet.

The artist teams then very noncovertly covered their walls with self-portraits that addressed fatherhood, delicate depictions of Iranian-American-Philippine-Canadian tree/humans being uprooted by bureaucratic aliens, many-penised tigers cavorting, and vacant Pac Man mazes. Actual street artist Lee Quinones showed up looking nervous as cop cars cruised by in broad daylight, and proceeded to assist the judging panel, which crowned Dusty Mitchell and Young Sun Han victors for their daddy-issue-packed self-portraits. The duo received $30,000 from Bluecanvas magazine (the moniker of Ms. Chow’s offshore trust-fund trove?). The Sucklord, meanwhile, was booted off the program for his contribution to the lackluster black-and-white maze painting.

LESSON: “Street art is anything, and anybody can put their voice on a wall,” the Sucklord generously informed The Observer in a postshow interview. Then he amended his statement, saying, “It’s not my place to say what street art is supposed to be,” before adding, “Street art is just, like, get to the point, get to it as directly as possible, get it on the fucking wall, and get the hell out of there.” And finally, “It’s corny to say what street art is, it’s kind of pretentious, you know, a kind of guy like Jerry Saltz trying to tell people what street art is.”

Indeed, the pieces that the judges favored in the challenge were, in the Sucklord’s words, “more akin to murals than street art,” all-too-carefully crafted under “phony” protected circumstances … much like many of the streetish artworks by top-selling street artists like, say, Shepard Fairey or Mr. Brainwash. Of creating his own “mural,” the Sucklord stated, “I felt like a tiny little rat in a maze trapped in some kind of psychological experiment that was designed to confuse me, break me down. In that regard it was an accurate portrayal of what I was really feeling. It just didn’t necessarily make for compelling street art.”

So what constitutes compelling street art today—is it painstakingly rendered artworks created while top auctioneers and gallerists loiter nearby, overseeing the making of the unlawful art/investments and offering critical feedback to the artists, who, rather than go undercover, are nationally televised B-list celebrities? That’s what Bravo would have us believe. And Bravo knows everything.

CONCLUSION: Well, perhaps clandestine, adrenaline-rush-inducing, just-for-the-lawbreaking-thrill-of-it street art is dead or dying, but artists whose minds remain in the street (not to say the gutter) do not lack recourse. “I completely failed as an artist,” the Sucklord confessed of his stint on Work of Art. “But I think in some regard it could be a successful piece of performance art. I’ll even venture to say that it was a performance art piece about public failure, in the style of Andy Kaufman,” he explained, before admitting, “Well that’s the excuse that everyone who loses makes—it was just a performance art piece! It was a joke, get it?”

editorial@observer.com