The art world has always been a space for social fodder and seems perpetually plagued with a steady flow of major scandals. To name a few, there was Inigo Philbrick’s now infamous arrest in Vanuatu in 2020 by the FBI on charges of wire fraud totaling an alleged $20 million, legendary gallerist Mary Boone going to jail for tax fraud in 2019, and the FBI seizing a suite of paintings that had been attributed to Jean-Michel Basquiat in broad daylight last year. And, perhaps the most famous to enter the cultural milieu: Anna Delvey (aka the “Soho grifter”), who swindled people in the art world, had an epic trial, and then became the subject of the 2022 Netflix series Inventing Anna, loosely based on her story.
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It’s only logical, then, to assume then that the art world would make the perfect subject for reality television. When you start to unpack this world, taking into consideration the larger mechanisms of power at work, however, it becomes even more fraught.
Whatthe art world is, whoits main players are, and what it takes to make it as an artist form the premise of MTV’s latest reality competition show The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist, which aired its season finale on Friday night. But what is this new show doing to shed light on the art world? And how is it helping to break down stereotypes that exist?
Set at the Maryland Institute of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, The Exhibit follows seven artists over the course of six weeks as they duke it out for a $100,000 prize and a presentation of their work at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. In typical reality TV fashion, it also features several art insiders as their guides, among them Hirshhorn director Melissa Chiu, MICA president Samuel Hoi, and writer Sarah Thornton (Seven Days in the Art World).
The six-episode show follows a familiar format, giving artists a weekly “commission” topic and a set time frame (as little as seven hours in one episode), and culminates in the artists displaying the finished work in a gallery space at MICA. There is also a critique-style format, in which the judges provide feedback and the artists present their work. However, for the final episode, where the winner was announced, the artists and judges got a change of scenery, and the drama unfolded at the Hirshhorn’s Annual Ball.
The weekly challenges themselves are not as engaging as they could have been. One week dealt with the role social media has come to play in the art world and the notion of “15 minutes of fame,” often misattributed to Warhol. This is all a bit limp: any artist can gain a following on Instagram now. Khan wins the episode with a photo-based sculpture showing them in a costume made from molds of their breasts and buttocks. For week 3, titled “Survive or Thrive,” the show focuses on how the pandemic impacted the artists, a topic that now feels tired. That week the Atlanta-based printmaker Jamaal Barber won with his touching prints based on his mentor, the football player George Nock, who passed away in the pandemic. The episode also produces one of the season’s most uncomfortable moments when Barber, who is clearly still grief stricken, has a breakdown on camera; production’s handling of that incident feels invasive and disrespectful to the artist’s loss. This might be the show’s only high-drama moment, as The Exhibit lacks a competitive spirit among the artists in general. There are no malicious takedowns in confessionals, and everyone seems friendly with each other. The net result: dull story lines and not a lot of action.
The Exhibit wants viewers to feel like they are part of a larger conversation around art, providing a crash course in art-historical jargon and artistic giants along the way. But as a show for mass consumption, it does little to decode the inner mechanisms of the art world for a general public or that it’s actually tuned into them. Not only does The Exhibit manage to fudge the idea of what an “emerging” artist is, it also uncritically showcases how privilege operates within this industry in general, without critiquing it.
The Exhibit is by no means the first reality competition show to pit artists against each other. The first of its kind came via taste-making art dealer Jeffrey Deitch, who carved out this space with Artstar. That was followed up four years later with Bravo’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist,which lasted two seasons and saw 14 contestants each season competing for $100,000 and a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.
Artstar and Work of Art had a transparency to them that felt novel. Most of the contestants weren’t widely known at the time, and details about the shows’ sponsors was made explicit, in keeping with a trend that can also be seen on competition shows like Project Runway and Top Chef. By contrast, The Exhibit feels like an advertisement for the Hirshhorn and MICA, and it offers little in the way of information about its funding. In a moment where museums have been facing difficulties recovering from the pandemic, where exactly is this money coming from?
A quick Google search shows that three of seven artists on The Exhibit are deeply entrenched in the New York art world, and that several others have also experienced professional success. Most have already had their first big break.
Before this show aired, Khan, a Brooklyn-based artist and graduate of Cornell’s architecture MFA program, won the second UOVO Prize, which comes with $25,0000 and Brooklyn Museum show that opened in 2021; they’re also represented by Simone Subal, a respected gallery known for working with intriguing artists. Khan ended up taking home the grand prize. Meanwhile, Jillian Mayer, a Miami-based artist who works in a range of media and is represented by leading Miami-dealer David Castillo, has staged performances at about a dozen institutions, including the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Nebraska, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and MoMA PS1 in New York, among others.
Additionally, work by Frank Buffalo Hyde, a Minnesota-based Onondaga painter, has been acquired by several major institutions, including the National Museum of the American Indian. His presence on the show is also helping to a larger “Indigenous renaissance” that he discusses through the show. Clare Kambhu has an MFA from Yale and was included in the Bronx Museum of Arts’s Fifth AIM Biennial in 2021.
While the idea that all of these artists are emerging was stretching the truth, the bigger crime is that the show operates on some of the bad art-world stereotypes. Several of the artists seem to represent personality tropes: Khan is the larger-than-life performance artist, Mayer is the quirky filmmaker, and Kambhu is the quiet and contemplative painter.
The dynamic between the artists and judges functions as yet another microcosm of the art world, i.e. whose work makes it, and who makes those decisions. As a main judge, Chiu can be found in every episode engaging with the artists and providing feedback. While she is meant to anchor the show, she also wields an immense amount of power as the Hirshhorn’s director, not just within the confines of the show but in the art world in general. In episodes five and six, Keith Rivers, a former NFL player turned art collector who sits on the Hirshhorn board, makes an appearance as a guest. Were it not for this competition, the artists might not make these kinds of connections that could change their career, which in and of itself is a flex on the museum’s part.
The imbalanced dynamics don’t end there, however. Due to the tight time frame for each week’s commission, the artists have to divide their time between finishing the work and installing it, which for some means showing a piece that is half-finished. For me, this conjures aspects of “wet paint” deals, where a work by today’s hottest artist is so fresh from the studio the paint is still drying. Over the past couple of decades, this has placed an inordinate amount of pressure on emerging artists to find monetary success right at the beginning of their careers, leading to a crash in their market or a career that isn’t sustainable. In the context of The Exhibit, this is only amplified, as the artists not only have to show works that are not fully realized but also defend them to the judges. Taken with the show’s definition of making it as an emerging artist means nabbing that a museum exhibition, the show presents only one form of art world success. The fact of the matter is that there are many ways to define and achieve success. There are many important and deserving artists, at all stages of their careers, who have not received the kind of institutional support that this show proffers, often from a combination of factors like systemic racism, sexism, politics, and more.
Art in some ways is meant to stand the test of time, and while some works age better than others, shows like The Exhibit won’t. While there were sometimes engaging side conversations among judges, the show overall trades on the gimmick of how important having a museum show is for an artist. In the process, it cheapens the very concept. Ultimately what could have helped to shed light on what happens in a world that can seem so impenetrable to outsiders falls flat on its face.
Correction, 4/12/23, 10:10 a.m.: A previous version of this article stated that both Baseera Khan and Jillian Mayer appeared in the show’s finale. Only Khan did. Additionally, this article incorrectly stated that Frank Buffalo Hyde’s work is already owned by the Hirshhorn.