David Kronke was appointed Mayor of Television after a bloodless coup in 2000. Since then, he has improved infrastructure, championed greater educational opportunities and fought for reforms that have utterly erased corruption and incompetence from the television industry. Since Mr. Kronke has ascended to power, Television is a far better place. Like watching paint dry
My heart lept with joy when I read this headline:
SARAH JESSICA PARKER TEAMS WITH MAGICAL ELVES TO EXPLORE THE WORLD OF ART
I think we’d all agree that that’s something we’d pay to see, right?
Ah, but then I read further into the press release, and my heart plunged back into its usual depths of despair: Magical Elves is the name of some production company, which, contrary to its moniker, in fact has no Magical Elves on its payroll. And all this thing is, is, yes, of course, another reality competition show. And Parker’s just an executive producer, not appearing on the show on any regular basis that the press release mentioned.
So, yeah: Group of artists all competing for a gallery show and a tour of their work. Each week, they do something different – painting, sculpting, photography, etc. – so most of what they’ll do won’t be in their genre and therefore not necessarily representative of what they do. So good luck with that. Though one week they pretty much have to be assigned to do a portrait of Parker – can’t wait to see them all get into that cubist face of hers.
Anyway, what an idea – the art world is so bitter, vindictive and simultaneously self-promoting/self-loathing it makes stand-up comics seem reasonably sane by contrast. Also, there’s no small amount of pretension, there, as well: Anyone who even auditions for the show will automatically be dismissed as a sell-out, except for the one genius who’ll do it as an act of performance art, hoping to undermine the show and reveal basic-cable reality-competition TV as the soul-draining horsesh!t that it is, but here’s betting the producers will be able to divine that individual’s true intentions ahead of time and keep him/her off the show, and so the show’ll proceed just like all these shows proceed and the winner will end up getting commissions from hotels in search of easily ignored paintings for their guestrooms.
Oh, wait: Forgot to include the requisite publicist-ese press-release quote: “We are excited to make the art world feel approachable and relatable, and are fortunate to collaborate with someone who is as passionate about art as Sarah is.”
No title yet, but I think “Watching Paint Dry” would be kind of great.