Draw Me: Art, Idols and Primetime

I'm all for art for the masses. In fact, I seem to have made a minor career out of begging for it. So now, as I hunker down for the next round of American Idol, the granddad of all the shows where we get to vote on the arts, one question continues to dog me. I cry along with everyone else when I witness those moments of raw performance, the ones where the artists themselves collapse into tears. They sing their hearts out and we stand beside them, texting on our phones. But what is really going on here?

Sure, Idol is entertaining. It also ripples with subtext. We're voting for our favorite, but the text-in is a really a pre-buy. We're guaranteeing an audience for an artist who isn't signed yet, removing all the risk from the recording industry, and chucking A&R people into the street. We're doing the industry's work for them, and paying our service providers for the privilege. It feels like the making of an artist, but it's more like making art a commodity.

Pretty dreamy business model. And it's so successful, we're bobbing in a sea of shows about the creative process, from Project Runway to Top Chef. They're marketing schemes as well, but I love them anyway. I love the mentoring, the collaborations, the crits... all the joys of art school. Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, however, is where I draw the line. Casting popular music as a commodity is fair, and art is a commodity, too. But the idea of winning an art career in primetime is, well, creepy.

There's only one prize on Idol. As appetizers, Work of Art offers cash and a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum. In a weekly orgy of self-reference, artists mimic the bankable trends, from Pop to political to street art. They're rewarded with wins, like cars and magazine coverage, but the prize that sticks in my craw is the inclusion of one mid-season work in an auction by the show's mentor, auctioneer-and-all-around-speculator, Simon de Pury. There's conflict of interest in Idol as well: the producers are hardly strangers to the industry. But we never see money change hands, and auctioning an artist whose primary claim might be playing one on TV is lascivious, to say the least.

I know. Sounds like a double standard. Music is art too, so why should the dollar signs all over Work of Art bug me? Well for starters, we all have iPods. Very few of us have a Warhol. If you like Kelly Clarkson, you can enjoy her for 99¢. You'll need $80 million for that painting of Marilyn Monroe. Of course, you can visit the Warhol, but access isn't as simple as walking through a museum door. Kelly Clarkson is a pop singer. Everyone understands the value in that. To understand the Marilyn's value, you need to locate the line between Marilyn the person, Marilyn the celebrity, and the Warhol, a comment on Marilyn, which scholars are still devoting years of study to. Ironic. It's Warhol's wry commentary on celebrity that's the driving force behind all reality shows, the fifteen minutes of fame. What isn't tongue in cheek is the carefully crafted velvet rope separating art from the rest of our culture. The rope is valuation, and Warhol was crystal clear about which side of the rope he was on. Pop music is all about access, but art is not. Art is about class.

And this is my real issue with Work of Art: there can be no Idol equivalent in the art world. Not because musicians are performers, and artists only sometimes are. Or because artists can be morbid, unfathomable, depressive, anti-social or egomaniacal. It's that we will never be asked to text in our vote on Work of Art because that is not how the art world works. Artists are anointed. Art is so rarefied, they have to be. So the only participation art audiences are entitled to is the removal of art once it's arrived, as with Mapplethorpe, Wojnarowicz, or even Serra. The contestants on Work of Art are not vying to fling the museum doors open from the inside. They are trying to get in themselves.

The problem with Work of Art lies deep within our culture. It's that we still haven't figured out how to navigate our relationship to art, in private spaces and within the public sphere, largely because of how we're trained to think about art in the first place. And for the moment, at least, texting has nothing to do with it.