What Happens When Art Gets Competitive on Television?

It was only a matter of time before the grist of contemporary art was fed into the too-familiar mill of competitive reality television. The Bravo network tested the concept in 2010 with Work of Art: The Greatest Artist (2010–11), and now MTV is back at it with The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist, in which seven artists compete for US$100,000 and a show at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. For a network executive, the conceit is a no brainer: out of thousands of applicants, it’s easy to cast an array of stylish, telegenic players while tapping into a subculture of rarefied coastal luxury. From the vantage of the art world itself, the show is cringeworthy, bordering on dystopian.

The blueprint here is familiar to fans of competitive cooking shows, in which contestants prove their virtuosity though weekly challenges. All the hallmarks of Great British Bakeoff (2010–ongoing) are here, rehung and covered with a wafer-thin layer of bright resin and platitudes about creativity. The Exhibit is organised around six prompts called ‘Commissions’, followed by a flurry of activity as the artists work side-by-side at studio tables, while the hosts Dometi Pongo and Hirshhorn director Melissa Chiu quiz each contestant in turn about the feasibility of their projects. The clock ominously clicks down, and pre-recorded interstitials of the participants at home in Miami (Jillian Mayer) or Brooklyn (Baseera Khan) give us a bit of insight into their hopes and dreams, all leading up to the ‘Crits’ and ‘Decision’ in which guest judges assess the work and name the winner during a tense reveal scene. In a humane twist, there is no weekly elimination, but the final ‘Portfolio’ is assessed at season’s end with these wins in mind. It’s just enough to reinforce a sense of urgency and elicit somewhat stilted bravado throughout.

Where Bake Off’s pleasures lie in the cozy prospect of amateurs working at a very high level by dint of their love of the game, all but one of The Exhibit’s participants (self-taught painter Jennifer Warren) are established professionals. Most studied in elite studio programs and many, such as Misha Kahn, boast works in major collections. The idea here is not so much that the elitism of art institutions is arbitrary and can be circumvented by talented outsiders. Rather, the ‘once in a lifetime opportunity […] to earn a career-defining exhibition’ promised at the outset is only available to those who have already cleared the gatekeepers, but somehow must still submit to the dictates of a reality show if they want to get ahead. For instance, Khan, with multiple high-profile shows to her credit, is already celebrating a meteoric rise.

While each is plainly skilled in their approaches – from printmaking (in the case of Jamaal Barber) and painting to interdisciplinary sculpture and performance – it not clear that any of the seven are able to produce especially good work under such constraints, nor should they. While it seems that contestants were given prompts like ‘gender’ to consider in advance, the form of the genre demands that they make their work under the scrutiny of the camera and a parade of interlocutors. As painter Clare Kambhu commented, ‘I’m working so much faster than I normally do, it’s like an art race.’ And while there is a real-world reason for speed and uniformity when making things to order in the realm of mixology or haute cuisine, there are no bonus points for speed in the world of studio art. The work here is judged, nonetheless, on the merits of ‘concept’, ‘originality’, and ‘execution’ – all dated impulses that promise something like an objective comparison between things that are not commensurable.

Sure, art has always circulated in a marketplace mediated by scarcity and prestige, but it can’t be appraised like the uniform piping on a dozen cupcakes. In the first episode, multimedia artist and guest judge Adam Pendleton offered the most generous and incisive ‘crits’, but seemed underwhelmed by what he saw. Ironically, if The Exhibit had ditched the conventions of the format and expanded the occasional moments of focus on process, it would be both edifying and hypnotic. By far the most compelling segments of episode one were Kambhu’s explanation of the melted-wax encaustic method she used in her pixelated painting, or shots of Kahn pouring slicks of bright material onto a mould and wrestling it into the shape of a massive banana in a Baltimore parking lot.

For all of the modernist paeans here to quality and originality, The Exhibit does not seem to be about the celebration of art as such. It distils the trappings of ‘the artist’ into a set of tropes about ‘contemporary life’ or ‘seeing differently’, suited to inspirational corporate jargon or, better, opportunities for synergistic branding. The logos and PR copy for the Hirshhorn and the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) – which provides the studio space – feature prominently, underscored by drone footage and lingering shots of their tastefully designed interiors. As a former faculty member at MICA and a long-time fan of the museum, this all seems like a curious capitulation to cultural spheres that their own workers typically oppose on philosophical or aesthetic grounds.

While much of American higher education is indeed facing a moment of existential uncertainty, the Hirshhorn is a stalwart, a publicly funded branch of the Smithsonian Institution free to the public, housed in a celebrated brutalist landmark on the National Mall. Yet, for those following its path over the course of the past decade under Chiu’s direction, this new role as reality show bauble is unsurprising. With a string of high-profile hits (notably Mark Bradford’s Pickett’s Charge [2017] and the recent Laurie Anderson survey), misses, and controversial acquisitions, the place no longer feels like a repository of modern art, and more a rampart in the battlefield for consumer attention. Per their numbers, attendance is way up; the permanent spectacle of Yayoi Kusama and Barbara Kruger installations are not novel but make for great social media and gift shop content. Chiu, once trained as an art historian, seems at ease in this new guise and The Exhibit reinforces her brand as much as the museum’s. In a bit of hyperbole, painter Frank Buffalo Hyde enthuses that Chiu is ‘the beginning and the end’ of the contemporary art world.

The Exhibit seems to be targeted at younger audiences and those who are interested in the mood board of contemporary art but not the commitment that such art often asks of us. That goes for the frustration, repetition and tedium that most artists endure as their projects are borne out in the space of months rather than hours, and for the sensible possibilities of encountering something as a viewer that is not already subsumed to the quantized morsels of the digital. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, with The Exhibit ultimately landing in Bake Off territory, creating an unlikely opening for the less established and more sincere among the cast. All indications are that it is either an augur of a dismal art world on the rise, or an unintentional satire of an economic system in which no cultural practice is insulated from the race to the bottom.

_{Main image: The Exhibit, 2023, still. Courtesy: Paramount}