The cameo occurs at minute 26, and you can watch it on the CW website, which doesn't seem to be working very well, or on this pirate one.

To give you the back story, which we do not have in its entirety: a character (let's call him MAN) is upset because someone else (his EX-WIFE?) somehow scheduled an APF gala the same night as his gallery opening. You'd think he could just reschedule the opening, but it turns out it's a problem more easily solved by buying a Richard Phillips painting for $1.1 million at a charity auction.

Here's a transcript of the cameo, at the gala:

DOREEN REMEN [to MAN]: I like that your artists reflect the same socially relevant projects we commission at Art Production Fund.

MAN: And I like that you can see the street art influence. I'm not talking about the '80s, but the '40s. Dubuffet, Pollock, Ray Johnson.

RICHARD PHILLIPS: ...when artists were the stars of New York. Instead of celebutantes.

EX-WIFE? [to MAN]: Excuse me, may I speak to you for a moment?

If you follow Mr. Phillips's work, or Gossip Girl, you know that he has a close relationship with the show. His work first appeared on it in 2008 and he painted a few of the stars for his "Most Wanted" teen icon series.

The cast and producers. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan)

The Bravo network has decided not to renew the art world reality show Work of Art for a third season. The producers of the show, which had aspiring artists compete in Project Runway-style challenges for fame, fortune and a show at the Brooklyn Museum, are now shopping it to other channels.

Despite having a premise that focused on outsiders, the show had the endorsement of a number of art world insiders. It was hosted by China Chow, daughter of Michael "Mr." Chow, and had as its regular judges Simon de Pury, Bill Powers, Jeanne Greenberg-Rohatyn and Jerry Saltz.

Dan Cutforth of Magical Elves, which produces the show, said that he's already had interest from other networks and believes that, as was the case when he brought Project Greenlight to Bravo from HBO, the show's message could endure a transition to a new channel.

"I feel like the show had something to say about the art world," Mr. Cutforth said in a phone interview. "I feel like there's a slow upswing right now in interest in art and I think that what we set out to do with the show was make art feel accessible, feel not like it was part of an elitist world or in some unobtainable ivory tower. We really tried to make it clear that art is purely subjective and everyone has their own opinions about it. I think that's still true and that that's a valuable message."

"That's art?" blustered Mr. Colbert, when presented with an image of one of the artist's basketball aquariums. Mr. Koons patiently explained that it represented a state of total equilibrium, like a womb.

"Uh do you know where babies come from?" Mr. Colbert said incredulously. "Actually I've seen your work and I think you do."

Watch below:

(Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman)

This evening's Newshour will features a profile of the artist Nick Cave, who had a major show of his "Soundsuits" at Jack Shainman and Mary Boone a few months ago, by reporter Jeffrey Brown.

Mr. Cave, of course, was the subject of a swipe in Morley Safer's most recent 60 Minutes piece about the art world. In it, he described art as a good investment, "certainly a bargain if your daddy’s a billionaire" and "easier to look at than pork bellies... or maybe not," with that last bit cutting to one of Mr. Cave's suits.

My colleague Andrew Russeth profiled the artist in August.

The segment will be here later tonight.

Still from 'Art in the 21st Century' (Courtesy PBS)

Tonight, Art in the 21st Century, the Peabody Award-winning television series which profiles 13 artists in four hour-long episodes, premieres on PBS at 9:00 p.m. EST. This season, the show—grouped into the episodes "Change," "Balance," "History" and "Boundaries"—will feature performance artist Marina Abramovic, art collective Assume Vivid Astro Focus, known for its carnivalesque installations (like the one it created for a 2008 exhibition at Deitch Projects), abstract artist Lynda Benglis, whose brightly-colored sculptures in poured latex and foam were exhibited at the New Museum last year, outspoken artist and human rights activist Ai Weiwei and Sarah Sze who will represent the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

As part of the Access '12 initiative, a worldwide campaign to give wide access to contemporary art and artists through a proliferation of public screenings and events, you can catch a screening at various venues across the country. In New York, there will be screenings at NYU on April 18, the Studio Museum in Harlem on April 22 and 29 and Brooklyn Artists Gym on May 11. If you can't make it out to one of those, you can also host your own screening.

As the show will be affected by the NEA's recent announcement that it will cut funding on several documentary series, including this one, which has received support from it in the past, the fate of the program is unknown.

A still from the "Gallery Girls" demo reel.

The Bravo network released a line-up of its in-development shows today along with a demo reel that features, at the top of the heap, Gallery Girls, the not-very-good-sounding reality show that follows seven girls as they strive to enter the New York art world without the slightest idea of how to go about doing that. The lineup features new details about the show, including the names of the aforementioned girls.

For a while, the show's working title was changed to Paint the Town but the demo reel features a logo with the original title, which was consistent with what we'd previously encountered on our trips to the set.

The description, which confirms the participation of collector scion Liz Margulies, follows:

Viewers are introduced to seven young women who dream of living a chic and fashionable existence in New York City. Chantal Chadwick, Kerri Lisa, Liz Margulies, Claudia Martinez, Angela Pham, Amy Poliakoff and Maggie Schaffer all share a passion for art, but are divided amongst their Manhattan and Brooklyn lifestyles with vastly different attitudes and tastes towards fashion, art and men.

And here's that demo reel, in which two people explicitly reference Sex and the City:

If you're just joining us we've been following this show from inception to Vice "Creator's Project," all over town, really.

The email in question. (Courtesy @HalfGallery)

Earlier today, man-about-town Bill Powers of Half Gallery tweeted an email he received from artist Richard Prince with the subject header, "U watch 60 min episode on art?" In the body of the email, Mr. Prince wrote, "no, but my mother did..." Though we're sure Mr. Prince loves his mother, his email seems like a dig at Mr. Safer for being out of touch.

While Mr. Powers tweeted that it seemed like a "21st century joke painting," Mr. Prince wrote further on his blog that his mother really had watched the show.

4/4/2012
My mother called me this past Sunday and told me she had just watched a segment on the art world on Sixty Minutes, (she's 94)...and wanted to know if I'd seen it. I told her "no." She said they talked about Cindy Sherman and Barbara Gladstone. (My mother has trouble seeing but no problems hearing.)

Mr. Prince asked his mother who did the reporting for 60 Minutes. "She said, 'Morley Safer,'" writes Mr. Prince. "I said, 'oh... isn't he the guy who paints watercolors of the hotel rooms where he stays when he's out on the road?'"

Whether or not he paints hotel rooms when he's on the road, he has at least exhibited his watercolor paintings of hotel lobbies in the '80s. Mr. Safer, who told New York Magazine in 2006 that he has been painting since he was six years old (“It’s a lifelong hobby”), had a gallery show in 1980, his only show of record. At this two-person show at Central Falls Gallery in SoHo, Mr. Safer presented "Paintings of Hotel Lobbies" alongside the "Sketches from the Courtroom" by courtroom artist Marilyn Church. His paintings reportedly sold for $200 to $500 and Walter Cronkite even bought one. Mr. Safer did mention on his 60 Minutes segment that Cindy Sherman's work was also being sold for $250 in the early '80s. Maybe his digs at the contemporary art world are sour grapes? We may never know. But we would like to see some of those paintings of hotel lobbies.

Mr. Safer examining a birthday cake at the Jewish Museum's 100th birthday celebration in 2004. (Courtesy Stephen Chernin/Getty Images)

On Sunday evening, the television journalist Morley Safer aired a follow-up to his 1993 attack on the art world on 60 Minutes. He visited the Art Basel Miami Beach fair—“an upscale flea market, a shopping mall fair,” he termed it, accurately—and walked around making glib remarks about art and the wealthy.

Though it’s hard to define Mr. Safer’s criteria for good art, he seems to like a bit of old-fashioned hard work: he swoons for Kara Walker, scorns Christopher Wool. Though many chalked up Mr. Safer’s distaste for the outré to Hilton Kramer-style conservatism, it is worth noting that he is speaking as an artist himself.

People magazine has written about his paintings a number of times. In 1993, after his first broadside, Mr. Safer revealed to the magazine that he likes art “that knocks me out. It has to hit you not just intellectually, but somewhere in the neighborhood of the heart.” Thus, he has painted hotel rooms that he stays in while traveling. “Who is going to memorialize Room 409 of the Holiday Inn unless I do?” he told People. And he said, way back in 1982, “I find it marvelously therapeutic.”

Roused by Mr. Safer’s attack, New York critic Jerry Saltz challenged him to curate an exhibition, of his own work and that of others. “I promise to review it fair and square,” Mr. Saltz wrote. “Deal?”

Mr. Safer declined the offer, in a statement to The Observer. “Mr. Saltz’s challenge is tempting, but I decline on the grounds that I have better, more pressing challenges as a working reporter,” he wrote. “As for his eagerness to judge my talent as a curator and painter, that is a pleasure I choose to deny him.”

Mr. Safer continued:

"I would, however, suggest to Mr. Saltz that he, as a pseudo gatekeeper of the visual arts, also has better things to do. The first might be to rediscover that 60 Minutes is alive and well and leading the pack in news broadcasts. It will certainly broaden his knowledge in any number of areas including by the way, the arts."

editorial@observer.com

A version of this article will appear in the April 4 edition of The New York Observer.

Ryan McGinley video at Team Gallery at Art Basel Miami (Still from '60 Minutes')

In all the hubbub over Morley Safer's segment on 60 Minutes in which he trashes the art world on a visit to Art Basel Miami Beach, a follow-up to his 1993 dig at the industry, one thing we haven't heard much of, at least not from Mr. Safer, is the names of the artists he shows in his segment—like Ryan McGinley, who made the video of a scantily clad woman holding a make-shift blowtorch, or Mike Kelley, responsible for the installation of sewn stuffed animals and Jennifer Rubell, whose interactive life-size sculpture of Prince William makes an appearance. And while Mr. Safer presents these works as emblems of his confusion and dismay at what has become of the art world, we can't help think what a thrill it is to see Paul McCarthy's large pink sculpture of a libidinous dwarf, White Snow Dwarf (Bashful), on national broadcast television. Savoring the moment with a few more artists, here's a breakdown of some more work we found in the segment, each one paired with one of Mr. Safer's signature bon mots at the time of their appearance.

2:28 Tony Cragg sculptures including Mixed Feelings (2011) at Thaddeus Ropac (“Upscale flea market”)

2:37 Jennifer Rubell’s interactive sculpture I'm Engaged to Prince William ("there's very little sense of an aesthetic experience here")

2:42 Takashi Murakami’s sculpture of a giant panda ("what you hear is the cacophony of cash")

2:47-2:50 Jaume Plensa, Marianna W followed by an installation view of A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janiero ("this fair seems to be about art as stuff or stuff as art")

2:51 Mike Kelley installation of stuffed animals sewn together at Tony Shafrazi ("just so much merchandise")

2:58 Picasso (“There are some timeless gems”)

2:59 Helen Frankenthaler's Blue Reach ("maintaining a quiet elegance")

3:00 Sean Landers's clown painting ("But they're shouted off the walls")

3:01 Paul McCarthy’s White Snow Dwarf (Bashful) at Hauser & Wirth (“by the kitsch”)

3:03 Red rose by Will Ryman at Paul Kasmin (with a Kenny Scharf painting in the background) (“the cute”)

3:05 Paulo Nazareth's sculpture of bananas falling out of a van at Mendes Wood ("and the incomprehensible")

3:07 Erwin Wurm, Police Cap (2011) at Thaddeus Ropac ("oversized headwear")

3:25 Video of a nude woman with a make-shift blowtorch, Ryan McGinley at Team Gallery ("And then there's the question you've been dying to ask. How much is this stuff worth?")

4:37 Installation by Do Ho Suh at Lehmann Maupin (“do baby blue translucent bathroom fixtures prick the imagination? Does that toilet seat raise our spirits?")

4:44 pink Erwin Wurm sculpture ("or is this the biggest scam")

5:30 Nobuo Sekine Phase-Drawing2 (Topology16) at Blum and Poe ("renowned for discovering the sharpest of cutting edge art")

6:53 Kara Walker drawing ("Eli Broad, the one-percenter of one-percenters," "collectors like Mr. Broad get first dibs on the really good stuff")

7:12 Cindy Sherman ("[Eli Broad] was one of her first collectors. He first bought her pictures back in 1982 for $250.")

7:40 Mary Boone booth with Warhol (yellow cow prints against blue in the background) ("For dealers the gold standard is selling to a major museum")

8:05 Anish Kapoor (“[Jennifer Stockman, Alexandra Monroe] and Barbara Gladstone went ape over this sculpture by Anish Kapoor”)

8:16 Haegue Yang installation (“this tangle of extension cords”)

9:14 Walking with Jeffrey Deitch into Larry Gagosian’s booth, in which there are works by Liechtenstein, Warhol and Jeff Koons (“the famously reticent Larry Gagosian”)

9:35 Jeff Koons painting Ribbon ("[Jeffrey Deitch] could not resist reminding us of our report of 1993")

11:04 Gerhard Richter painting (“certainly a bargain if your daddy’s a billionaire”)

13:02 Zhang Huan, 49 Days ("Easier to look at than pork bellies")

13:04 Nick Cave, Soundsuits ("or maybe not")

Some others we spotted were a Christopher Wool at Luhring Augustine and Thomas Houseago's Ghost of a flea at Hauser & Wirth. If you spot some more, let us know in the comments below.

'He reluctantly graced us with a few words of wisdom,' says Mr. Safer. (Courtesy '60 Minutes')

Last night, nearly 20 years after he first attacked the contemporary art world on 60 Minutes, Morley Safer returned to the subject in an episode of his newsmagazine. The result was pretty underwhelming.

Mr. Safer shot the program last December at Art Basel Miami Beach. "This is where the art trade's carefully constructed mask of Olympian high culture begins to crack, and the underside of a booming, cutthroat commodities market is revealed," he says, and adds, "There's very little sense of an aesthetic experience here."

Art is expensive, the television journalist reveals, and wealthy people buy it. Viewing art at fairs is sometimes unpleasant. Some art is good, but most of it is bad. (Surprisingly, Mr. Safer is a Kara Walker fan: "a truly gifted American artist.") It'd be nice if Mr. Safer had a more expansive view of art—or just more curiosity about it—but there's nothing here that's going to make anyone too upset.

There are, however, plenty of guest appearances by various art types, like New York/Brussels gallerist Barbara Gladstone, Eli Broad ("the one-percenter of one-percenters," quips Mr. Safer) and Los Angeles gallerist Tim Blum, who shares: "We're from Hollywood—we're in the acting game. It's theater. This is all theater."

Larry Gagosian also makes an appearance and takes his own distinctive approach to handling Mr. Safer. At first, the dealer apparently just ignores him. "At least say hello!" Mr. Safer calls over during a tour of the fair with a natty, friendly Jeffrey Deitch. And then—just watch the clip.

And now there's even more of Mr. Safer for you to enjoy, below.