I hadn’t heard much recently about the plan Sarah Jessica Parker announced last year to co-produce a Top Chef-style artists’ competition show for cable TV. I thought the slump in the art market, and the attendant downward plummet of the Artworld Glamor Index, might mean that the whole idea had gone away. But it turns out that things have advanced to the stage of July “casting calls” in New York, Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles.
The Bravo channel issued an announcement Tuesday about what it’s still calling “the untitled art project”. Unless that’s the title, which is probably a bit too Dada for this show.
In each episode of the series, contestants will create unique pieces highlighting art’s role in everyday life, while they compete and create in a range of disciplines including sculpture, painting, photography and industrial design (to name a few). In working beyond their preferred mediums, artists will have to adapt quickly in order to succeed. Completed works of art will be appraised by a panel of top art world figures including fellow artists, gallerists, collectors, curators and critics. The finalists’ work will be showcased in a nation-wide museum tour.
This leads to a few questions. Are these artists, curators and critics going to issue the snap judgments that judges on Top Chef and Project Runway pronounce? You might be able to get away with that when you’re talking about a tuna tartare on a pool of lingonberry foam but I don’t think it will work for something, like art, that takes a little longer to process. And where will they find people even willing to try?
Hmmm….Jeff Koons, check your messages.
And about that “nation wide museum tour” — where are the producers going to find museums willing to associate themselves with a project this blatantly commercial?
Oh wait, they can just contact the places that took that new King Tut show.