Review: Reality show ‘The Exhibit’ turns art into blood sport

Recently, a study showed that the strongest signal to “make it” as an artist today is not talent or a Master of Fine Arts or group exhibitions. What matters most, the study says, is validation: how quickly an artist can gain institutional support in the form of a solo show in a major gallery or museum. Everything else follows. There seem to be few other ladders to climb.

That explains the latest reality show from MTV and the Smithsonian Channel, The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist, a show that turns advertising into the ultimate prize. Over six episodes, seven up-and-coming artists compete for $100,000 and an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institute’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC -and-coming (Misha Kahn, whose “Watermelon Party” is exhibiting at Dries Van Noten’s flagship store in LA in 2021 to the established but overlooked (Frank Buffalo Hyde, whose work is held by the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe).

In a well-known formula, artists are given several hours to create a “commission” on a given theme – gender, social media – and their work is critiqued by a rotating panel of judges, including artist Adam Pendleton and writer Kenny Schachter . After six weeks, an artist will achieve a level of visibility that normally only megagalleries can offer. For artists who cannot rely on traditional platforms to always work in their favor, the show offers a throwback to a prejudiced gallery system and an opportunity for them to expand their audience.

Yet these gladiator games in the culture arena are a tacit confirmation of the destructive belief that culture is a blood sport. Artists are already competing for approval, resources, and attention, and The Exhibit only exacerbates the problem by labeling it as entertainment.

This isn’t the first show cast from this mold. In 2010, Bravo’s Artwork: The Next Big Artist, produced by the company behind Project Runway and Top Chef, capitalized on a neat parallel between art-world crushing drama and reality TV’s familiar conceits. The show also offered a $100,000 cash prize, as well as a one-man show at the Brooklyn Museum, where a trustee resigned in protest, dismissing the museum’s perception as “a party spot and a center of celebrity.Critic Jerry Saltz apologized for his role as judge in the first season, describing her as “bad for art. (He subsequently returned for the next season.)

After winning the second and final season, Kymia Nawabi narrated hyperallergic: “Unfortunately, the show hasn’t really impacted my career (yet) in very obvious ways. I thought there were some galleries interested in my work: no. I thought I would make a lot of new sales: no.” Despite decent ratings “art work” was canceled followed by the even more short-lived “Gallery Girls,” which followed several upstarts in New York’s glamorous gallery scene and, tellingly, ended when a performer chose a job at a luxury concierge over an internship at a reputable arts consultancy.

The Exhibit wisely keeps its institutional affiliation at a calculated distance. Melissa Chiu, director of Hirshhorn and the show’s head judge, opens the competition by calling the contemporary art museum “the wild child” of the Smithsonian. Hosted by MTV’s Dometi Pongo, it’s certainly a bolder and more irreverent show than the lush close-ups of wet paint and somber galleries would lead you to believe, more aligned with the museum’s high-profile initiatives with contemporary artists likeBarbara Krueger And Nicolas party. After less cutthroat crafting tournaments like The Great Pottery Throw Down and Blown Away, the show tries to cultivate a congenial atmosphere and eschews weekly eliminations. In its earnest embrace of sportsmanship, The Exhibit seeks to renegotiate a parasocial relationship with reality TV and bring some much-needed levity to the rare and often forbidden province of fine art.

But within 10 minutes, factions and villains emerge as predictable tropes. Purebred artists lapse into MFA jargon as they mock the self-taught painters who find camaraderie and motivation in being ostracized by the mainstream; Sculptors and mixed media artists confront painters and draftsmen in a gentle parody of centuries of academic debate. Indigenous painter Frank Buffalo Hyde, for example, critiques the attention given to young, institutionally recognized artists over those who “have been doing the work for a long time”—a fair critique, albeit one whose superficial treatment here typifies the artist and a Era sets up conflict.

Rivalry can be generative. It can sustain creativity over long careers and push the boundaries of artistic experimentation. But that sense of competition is in frustrating contradiction to an issue-of-the-week format that expects artists to create fresh (and readable) work on demand.

Entrants are judged on their originality, quality of execution and strength of concept – a set of criteria so universal as to be essentially worthless. In the first review, which includes work on gender, Misha Kahn is angered for an overly ambitious resin sculpture of a banana (“a novelty toy,” says Schachter). Visibly unfazed, Pendleton dismisses Jamaal Barber’s vaguely Cubist charcoal portrait of a bisexual sitter as “superfluous” and criticizes Jillian Mayer’s olfactory work, which exhales hormones for failing to “activate the space.” Not only is this criticism familiar, but it offers its subjects no sense of vision and path. If The Exhibit’s own judges don’t even buy the show’s promise that the museum can play kingmaker for a new class of artists, why should we?

Any competitor could have been awarded $100,000 for less than the production budget, and the show’s cash price doesn’t even match “Work of Art’s” balance of inflation. Baseera Khan, The Exhibit’s mainstay artist, has already had a good response solo exhibition in the Brooklyn Museum. What do you have to win? The award show is just one work: the winner’s sixth commission for the season finale. While this is hardly the “exhibit of life” promised in the trailer, the shrine of spectacle is sure to be “career-defining,” as Pongo puts it.