Art and Reality TV

I haven't seen "Work of Art," the new reality tv show/competition for artists. I figured it would be inane and also make my blood boil about what passes for art in our world. In The New Republic, Jed Perl explains that the art world and reality tv aren't really that far apart:

There was a time when I might have dismissed “Work of Art” as a case of the pop culture czars turning the art world into another one of their fiefdoms. But after I watched the first episode, I was tempted to reverse the equation. I began to wonder if the whole ludicrous phenomenon of reality TV could not be traced back to the art world, and the cult of pseudo-documentary filmmaking that began with Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls in 1966. Warhol pioneered a cinema verité that was dedicated to gossip, backbiting, boredom, and the general proposition that most people are rotten at the core and should be happy with their 15 minutes of fame, if they are lucky enough to have it. Doesn’t that more or less describe reality TV? It was Warhol who discovered the narcotic allure of cinematic literalism.

Later on Perl gets to the issues that I wonder about:

And this brings us to the other problem with “Work of Art,” a problem that has nothing much to do with reality TV. The high-end art world has been seriously unserious for so long that I doubt anybody involved can any longer recognize an artistic reality when they see one.

Maybe this show is really a brilliant idea, not a stupid one, because it will make the point that the contemporary art world is no different from reality tv.