If you’ve gone for a stroll recently—you know, a stroll, that thing one sometimes goes for when one’s television is broken—you may have noticed something strange was afoot.

Of late, the city has become a wasteland in which tiny people dressed up as the angriest of birds and the most patriotic of captains roam the streets demanding you feed them. Yes, I’m talking about Halloween, when women ride the subway in their undergarments, and we all remember how adorable children are, even when their sick-minded parents have dressed them as zombie Amy Winehouses. Read More

I’m going to posit that if you went into a pitch meeting with the programming bigwigs at Bravo and laid out your plans for a reality television show on—wait for it—semantics, you’d get kicked to the sidewalk before you could say “Chomskyan internalism.” And yet, ostentatious semantic debate, like ugly futons and alcohol poisoning, is a staple of a well-rounded higher education. So (and for this we’re quite grateful), Bravo has graciously acquiesced to the shtick of this weekly column—from which you, dear reader, are receiving a university-grade tutorial on contemporary art as defined by a reality television show. Therefore, before you start thinking you’re ready to graduate from the Lycée Bravo just because you passed Padma Lakshmi’s seminar on Foucault, it’s time to review the lecture notes from Work of Art: The Next Great Artist’s recent foray into defining the relationship between linguistic symbols and their meanings. Read More