#Brooklyn museum tv#

In the first crit, featuring works about gender, Misha Kahn is dinged for an overly ambitious resin sculpture of a banana (“a novelty toy,” says Schachter). But this sense of competition is frustratingly at odds with an issue-of-the-week format that expects artists to fashion topical (and legible) work on demand.Ĭontestants are judged for their originality, quality of execution and strength of concept - a set of criteria so universal that it’s essentially valueless. It can sustain creativity over long careers and push the bounds of artistic experimentation. The Indigenous painter Frank Buffalo Hyde, for example, criticizes the attention given to young, institutionally validated artists over those who’ve long “done the work” - a fair critique, though one whose cursory treatment here typecasts the artist and sets up an ageist conflict. Pedigreed artists lapse into MFA jargon as they trash talk the self-taught painters, who find camaraderie and motivation in being ostracized from the mainstream sculptors and mixed-media artists are pitted against the painters and draftspeople in a gentle parody of centuries-long academic debates. Yet, within 10 minutes factions and villains emerge as predictable tropes.

#Brooklyn museum tv#

In its earnest embrace of sportsmanship, “The Exhibit” wants to renegotiate a parasocial relationship to reality TV and inject some much-needed levity into the rarefied and often forbidding province of High Art. Following in the wake of less cutthroat craft tournaments like “The Great Pottery Throw Down” and “Blown Away,” the show seeks to cultivate a congenial vibe, forgoing weekly eliminations. Hosted by MTV’s Dometi Pongo, it’s certainly a bolder and more irreverent show than its sumptuous closeups of wet paint and dim galleries might have you believe, more aligned with the museum’s high-profile initiatives with such contemporary artists as Barbara Kruger and Nicolas Party.

Melissa Chiu, the Hirshhorn director and the show’s chief judge, opens the competition by describing the contemporary art museum as “the wild child” of the Smithsonian. “The Exhibit” wisely holds its institutional affiliation at a calculated distance. I thought I was going to make a ton of new sales: nope.” Despite decent ratings, “Work of Art” was canceled and succeeded by the even more short-lived “Gallery Girls,” which followed several upstarts in New York City’s glamorous gallery scene and ended, tellingly, when one cast member chose a job at a luxury concierge over an internship at a prestigious art advisory. I thought there would be some galleries interested in my work: nope. For artists who can’t depend on traditional platforms always working in their favor, the show offers a recourse to a prejudicial gallery system and an opportunity for them to expand their audience.Īfter winning the second and final season, Kymia Nawabi told Hyperallergic: “Unfortunately, the show has not really impacted my career in very obvious ways (yet). After six weeks, one artist will vault to a level of visibility that typically only megagalleries provide. In a familiar formula, the artists have several hours to make one “commission” in response to a given theme - gender, social media- and their work is critiqued by a rotating panel of judges, including the artist Adam Pendleton and writer Kenny Schachter.

flagship in 2021) to the established but overlooked (Frank Buffalo Hyde, whose work is held by the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe). Contenders range from rising stars (Baseera Khan, who’s been reviewed in Artforum, Frieze and the New Yorker) to the up-and-coming (Misha Kahn, whose “Watermelon Party” was exhibited at Dries Van Noten’s L.A. Across six episodes, seven rising artists compete for $100,000 and an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institute’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. That explains MTV and the Smithsonian Channel’s newest reality offering, “The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist,” a show that transforms endorsement into the ultimate prize. There are apparently few other ladders to climb. What matters most, according to the research, is endorsement: how quickly an artist can secure institutional support in the form of a solo exhibition at a major gallery or museum. A little while ago, a study showed that the strongest signal for “making it” as an artist today isn’t talent or a master of fine arts degree or group shows.