Eventually, every profession will have its turn in the Bravo reality competition spotlight—that's a given. Pretty soon, what you call "work" will be "this competition," none of us will be there to make friends, throwing under various metaphorical buses will be rampant, and within ten years, salaries and wages will be done away with entirely and we'll all be paid in a chance to win a Saturn Sky Roadster and the title of "Top [Fill-in-the-Blank]".
Having already turned fashion design, interior design, hair-cutting, dance, and chefery into reality competition shows, Bravo is moving one step closer to this dystopia with their latest profession-turned-reality-game-show: American Artist, a show created by that modern-day Peggy Guggenheim, Sarah Jessica Parker.
From The Hollywood Reporter:
Sarah Jessica Parker's art competition reality show has found a home at Bravo.
The network has picked up "American Artist," from Parker's Pretty Matches production company and wunderkin producers Magical Elves, as part of its development slate.
The hourlong show has been described by the Elves team of Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz as a "Project Runway"-style competition series that takes on the art world. Aspiring artists compete to produce various styles of artwork (painting, sculpting, etc.), which is then judged by a panel of experts.
While a challenge like, "This week, create a sculpture that shows who you are as an artist. You have 4 hours and access to everything in the Glad Family Of Products Creativity Bin," sounds about as exciting as "Design a hotel room around one of the four elements," the show does have some possible entertainment value. American Artist, more than any of the other profession-based series in Bravo's increasingly crowded reality-competition thunderdome, has the most potential for legitimately insane contestants. When Pip, a Shock Art acolyte, shows up at Judges Gallery with yet another bedspread stolen from the Atlas apartments smeared with more of his mother's menstrual blood that he brought in a jar from home (show him where in the contract it says he can't bring a jar of his mother's menstrual blood, okay?) repeating, "Being on this show is my art," it will make Christian Siriano's endless chirping of "fierce" seem all the more tame.
Not to mention the possibility of casting wildlife artists (those are artists who also happen to be wildlife, not people who depict wildlife in their art). Hopefully, at least one painting elephant will be chosen, because the whole "being an elephant" school is really big in the art world these days.