Work of Art: The Next Great Artist Season 2

Cafe Society
1

Anybody watching Work o’Fart? I love this show.

A weird crowd of artists this year, of course. I couldn’t help but think that the Sucklord is running a meta-prank, but there were some commenters to the EW review who say they know him and that he’s always like that. I’m glad he didn’t get booted right away. Young, the performance artist, looks like he’s going to be fun to watch. I like Dusty, the elementary school teacher, but I’d be surprised to see him last very long. Kathryn, the artist of anatomy and gore, may be too one-note.

Good choices of winners and losers in the first episode, I thought. Jerry Saltz’s blog discusses the deliberations.

2

No one?

3

I’m surprised the Sucklord didn’t get booted. That - thing- he made was seriously underwhelming. He turned 2D kitsch into 3D kitsch. He talked about how inspired he was by The Lord of the Rings, yet his artwork was uninspired and uninspiring. Now we have another week of everyone calling him “Sucklord”. Seriously, “Sucklord”?

4

I’ve never watched the show, but I know, and have been ripped off by, last season’s Peregrine Honig. Not a well loved person back in Kansas City.

5

Dang, I didn’t even know they’d started up again. I watched last year and enjoyed it. I’ll have to catch a repeat of the first episode.

6

I love this show. Please tell us what happened with Peregrine. Why is she not well loved?

I thought the elimination was fair. That was one ugly video. Bayete as the winner mystified me. He was just ripping off 1980’s music videos. I would have given it to the person with the deconstructed roller coaster sculpture. That was my favorite piece of the night.

7

I never understand why they get these one-note artists and then eliminate them because their work is too repetitive / derivative. Surely versatility should be a crucial part of the selection process for this show!

Anyone else notice “The Sucklord” is 42 years old?!? I was impressed with his leadership in this episode though, and liked his idea for the group project (Goldberg device)

Sort of interesting how the deaf guy’s idea got his team in trouble but none of them blamed him.

8

I was introduced to her by a mutual friend who did the photography of the final version of “Two Fauns”. Another photographer had shot it earlier, but had the sheer effrontery ask to be paid and be credited, so she had it shot again.

I was hired to shoot a piece for her on HD video. I did so, spending the morning at her studio, capturing the material to my editing system and processing the speed of the material to fit into 10 minutes. I then had to play this back and forth game trying to find out what format to deliver this HD material on - BluRay, whatever. I did all this for the laughably low price of $200.

I finally wind up delivering a SD DVD. I should have known that she was bullshit when she said that she wasn’t going to be able to pick up the DVD from me, and I needed to deliver it to her studio, and no, she was out at dinner with friends and couldn’t get free, just leave an invoice and I’d get paid right away.

Nearly a year later, I still have not received money from her. The mutual friend paid me, embarrassed by his friend being such a cheap bitch.

As for the story of “Two Fauns”? She bought the taxidermy from the window of a shop in Brookside. My friend did the photography. Her “art” in this case was shopping.

I wound up working with another Kansas City artist several months later. Peregrine came up in conversation, that I had worked for her, and this woman immediately called her “…that cunt!” In my experience, it takes a lot for one woman to call another woman that term.

As I got more and more annoyed over her dodging paying me for work I had done, and a string of increasingly nonsensical e-mails from her with changing stories, I talked to other friends in the arts in Kansas City. The KC arts community is littered with burned bridges and people who have been ripped off by her. From what I understand, she’s in Italy right now, and few are sad to see her gone.

I didn’t watch the TV show. Other than “Two Fauns” and the piece I shot, I am unfamiliar with her work. I looked around the studio, and saw some work that looked like a rip-off of Henry Darger’s In the Realms of the Unreal.

9

I watched season 1. So far I’m disappointed with season 2. Bunch of one note weirdos. I can’t get over how limited they are.

Do art schools still require classes in all mediums? Any decent art degree should require sculpting, oils, watercolors the full range of art.

The so called artists on this show seem incapable of doing work other than their own very narrow style.

10

I’m caught up now with the first two episodes. I agree with **aceplace57 **in being disappointed with the artists so far.

The crying woman who got sent home in the 2nd episode was scary. I don’t think they sent her home so much because her art sucked (which it did), but because they saw how poorly she handled the pressure and were afraid if they kept her around she would freak out and either kill herself or someone else, or both. That’s a bit of hyperbole, but she was pretty creepy and her obsession with making art that looks like guts didn’t help.

I was as dumbfounded as Simon when after being shown the parkour performance as inspiration, one group decided to use “digestion” as their theme and the other group pretty much just said “fuck the theme, let’s just each do what we want and we’ll make up some bullshit explanation to tie them together.”

After Simon confronted them about this, at least the poop group had the sense to start fresh and make some art that moved. The other group just threw their hands up in the air and said “circles.” And the crying bitch had her head so far up her own ass that she still couldn’t get beyond her guts and come up with a new idea.

What an unimaginitive group of artists.

11

I think WoA, like any reality competition show, is going to bring in a few unstable one-note people just for freak appeal, to be colorful cannon fodder for as long as they manage to hang on. Guts woman was one of those. They probably imagined the Sucklord as one such, too, but he has some self-awareness and might stick around. He might wind up with his own show.

12

We thought that last year’s show was a stitch, it was so over-the-top. Everyone (including artists and judges) was so full of themselves: glue two sticks together and talk about the existential essence of reality reflected therein. And any art that dared to be “representational” was typically dismissed with disdain. As I say, it was a stitch.

This year’s gang don’t seem to be quite so conceited (with a few exceptions, like Sucklord the Super Villain.) Agreed, there are a few artists who are engaged in their own hang-ups and don’t seem flexible enough, but one assumes they’ll be dismissed quickly in the first few episodes (which seems to be happening, mostly.) Although we thought the French guy got wholloped unfairly in the frist episode, we really liked his work when the red background was removed.

13

SUCKLORD! Why is he still around? No, don’t tell me; I already know. Someone else has always screwed up more than him. I disagree that he’s a Super Villain, just Super Mediocre.

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I’ll just say that Lola is hot

15

I wouldn’t say Sucklord is a Super Villain – it’s more that they’re trying to make him the Super Villain and he’s too mediocre to make the cut.

16

It amazes me how few artists seem to paint anymore. Everybody wants to use physical media. Sticks, paper, stone etc.

It seems like many of these challenges are straight out of an art school syllabus. Pick a story from the newspaper and use it to inspire an art piece. Seems pretty straight forward.

The lack of imagination in some of those pieces was disappointing. I wasn’t impressed with the winner at all. The judges were more impressed by his political statement (some missing artist) than the work itself.

I thought Dusty had the best piece this week. Loved the map with the silhouettes of people.

17

I love Work of Art! It get so tantalizingly close to being an ironic spoof of reality TV, and yet somehow it manges to keep enough earnestness to be just barely believable. It wholeheartedly embraces the fact that reality TV is mostly a train wreck of horrible people doing horrible things, and yet it keeps up it’s premise enough that it’s still compelling. It’s so meta that it is meta.

I watched last year, and to my surprise when I turned it on this year, I saw someone I knew! I worked with Bayete back in the day when his side job was taking high school dance photos, which was actually a lot of fun given the amount of creativity that the kids in inner-city Oakland come up with. I can say that he is a truly, genuinely warm hearted and decent guy. His photographic work can be very good, but because his focus is so heavy on issues of identity and communities, it’s at his best when he is working with the language of documentary and working in the context of the communities that he is working with- which isn’t really well suited to this kind of competition. Anyway, he’s a really great guy.

Incidentally, grab a camera phone and try the “filming while spinning around” thing. It is a really fun effect.

18

I agree. He is unbelievably boring, which should be a capital offense in the art world, and I want him to go away so I never have to hear anyone say “Sucklord” with a French accent ever again.

This crew is definitely not as talented as the artists in the first season. I think they should scrap the lot of them and start over again.

19

I can’t believe we had yet another woman sobbing because she got a bad critique. Such sensitive souls, they burst into tears at a negative word!

But I thought Sara J’s piece was inappropriate and should have gotten her kicked out. The who did the ‘GROW’ sculpture had a more creative thought process for sure. I also think Dusty should have won.

20

I am totally and completely in love with Jerry Saltz. His blog about the show is better than the show itself. Thanks for the link, Tom Tildrum.

We need less suck and more lord. I am going with Kymia or Michelle for the win.