Reality’s Got Nothin’ To Do With It.

I started watching a reality TV show on the weekend called “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist”. It took a great deal of effort since my inclination is to say “art is subjective and as such can’t, and shouldn’t, be judged for the purpose of determining which piece is ‘better’ “. There is no good or bad art in my opinion. You either like a piece or you don’t, but the choice is individual not collective. Once you get critics, (or in this case “judges”), in the mix, what you end up with is socially acceptable, or general art which is palatable to the masses and individual free thought is the casualty.

As I suspected, they had the contestants jumping through hoops like little poodles at a dog show, telling each participant how to express themselves given a certain medium, and then judging them on their efforts. For example, one challenge was to take found objects in a junk pile and create art with it. I got quite upset at this since it immediately alienated anyone who wasn’t already a sculptor of some sort. Not everyone is hardwired to turn anything into art. This simply meant they were looking for a general artist who could do many things rather than specializing in a certain medium. This also meant that the competition was corrupt from the beginning since they already had a preconceived notion of what they were looking for.

After a little bit of grumbling I walked to my television set and picked up the popcorn off the floor that I had been liberally throwing and watching bounce off the noses of the judging panel.  It came back to me during my short walk that there is very little reality in reality TV. Reality TV, like all other forms of television shows, are meant to entertain and have very little to do with real life. I, like so many others, get caught up in the conflict of the situation and mistake it for something like life. Life, for the most part, is pretty mundane and a true reality TV show would make for a very long period of sitting in front of the TV watching other people sitting and watching TV. Not very entertaining to say the least.

I find it very ironic that during the aforementioned challenge,  one artist took a few TV’s from the junk pile, placed them in a situation where they were watching another TV, and on one of the TV’s was painted “Reality TV?” . This work of art challenged the concept of the very TV show they were on. I thought it was very clever and quite bold to bite the hand that feeds so to speak. The irony comes from the fact that he was voted off for this piece.

Is it a sheer coincidence that he was booted off for the piece, or was the piece just weak. I, unlike the judges and critics, will let you decide.