Tuesday 14 February 2012

Art for money's sake

I've just seen a trailer on one of the digital channels for a show called 'The Next Big Artist', or some such. It's yet another 'reality' show where people are pitched up against each other, and in front of judges, to subject their talent to criticism by those judges and the public alike. You get the idea.

Well, needless to say, I've got a few issues with this 'concept'. Firstly, it's totally, totally unoriginal. Doesn't anybody in TV even care that this is exactly the same as has already been done countless times before? Why do they simply take an idea and wring it out again and again until there's nothing coming out of it, and then keep using it anyway? Like a 10-times used teabag, this will produce a watery brew indeed. And did the producers of this particular strain not notice the inherent contradiction in an entirely formulaic programme being used as the vehicle to 'find' an exciting new artist?

But there's a greater issue with this incarnation particularly. I realise this is an issue with all these 'reality' programmes, but its particularly true of this one. In the case of music or talent shows, they inevitably become popularity rather than talent contests. But art, of all these forms of expression, is surely the most subjective, the most personal of them. One man's profound statement on the emptiness of modern culture and the hopeless nature of being is another man's bog nailed half-way up the wall. How can you make art a competition? It's not 8-year-olds being asked to design a Christmas card, for God's sake – it's going to be rather more earnest, rather more fractious than that. It'd make for even duller TV than it's likely to be if it weren't fractious, at least. And how can you possibly expect it to be judged objectively, even by professionals, let alone by the public, if indeed that's what they're proposing to do? Even if they can indeed be objective, isn't the whole point of art, modern art in particular, about the individual's response to each piece? A direct contradiction of objectivity in the first place.

So the concept is fundamentally flawed from the outset, in addition to all the other faults I've already complained about. So expect bonkers pieces put together by chin stroking, earnest, wilfully odd young artists desperate to make their mark in a crowded marketplace where actual talent is held, to my ignorant eyes at least, at a considerably lower premium than how fashionable an artist happens to be. Expert judges will nod sagely, explaining for us halfwit masses just how important what this glued-together collection of plastic triangles, stuffed kittens and human excrement has to 'say' is.

I say masses – I strongly suspect the audience for this latest clone will be pretty small. The problem TV has is that, unlike an artist, who only needs one influential, preferably wealthy nutcase to find Catshit Plastic And The Pointlessness Of It All worthy of two hundred grand to make it big, it lives or dies by the judgement and attention of the viewers. I suspect I may be with the majority on this one and giving it a miss. Sometimes the public are not bad judges, after all.

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