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On a sweltering Wednesday night it was business as usual outside the Brooklyn Museum. There were smokers, BMX bikers, a lone juggler and someone passed out on the grass. Few seemed to care about the klatch of smartly dressed people nibbling plantain chips inside the museum's glassed-in lobby. But amid this throng, gathered for the grand finale of Bravo's reality-TV show "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist", it was hard to consider anyone else. We had come to learn who would end up with the big prize: a solo show at the museum, plus $100,000.

The show, an elimination contest in the vein of "Project Runway" or "Top Chef", pitted 14 aspiring artists against each other in a series of challenges judged by Jerry Saltz, a critic for New York magazine, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and Bill Powers, both gallerists, and China Chow, the presenter. A rotating cast of guest judges included big art names such as Ryan McGinness and Andres Serrano. Sarah Jessica Parker is the executive producer. In an earlier post, we pondered how such a contest could work for such a subjective field—how, indeed, does one judge a work of art? This party, where contestants rubbed elbows with judges and buddies, seemed like a good place for More Intelligent Life to at least learn how the artists felt about it all.  read more »

To watch an episode of the new ABC Family show "Pretty Little Liars" is to conjure an image of the focus group that no doubt spawned the show's concept: one visualises a round-table of youth-culture experts excitedly throwing out ideas: " 'Gossip Girl' meets 'CSI'!" or " 'Sweet Valley High' plus 'Nancy Drew' multiplied by 'The Craft' and divided by 'Melrose Place'!" It's a reasonable response, because "Pretty Little Liars" presents itself as a shameless jumble of ready-made concepts. Even the show's tagline, "Never trust a pretty girl with a secret," seems designed to elicit thoughtless nods. It's not a show that asks viewers to stop and ponder a single thing. It's textbook summer entertainment.

Based on a young-adult novel series by Sara Shepard, the show revolves around the abduction and murder of one Alison DiLaurentis, the pretty ringleader of her high-school clique. In the years following Alison's death, her high-school friends receive text messages from a mysterious "A" and grapple with secrets of varying salacity: a lesbian romance, an affair with a teacher, cheating parents, a lab explosion, and plenty of intrigue surrounding the circumstances of Alison's death. The acting is hammy and the characters straight from Central Casting, with the show's four lead actresses designated the jock, the nerd, the babe and the artsy one. This is the television equivalent of canned whipped cream: cheap, sweet and easy.  read more »

Calling all couch potatoes and media theorists: "The Cult TV Book", edited by Stacey Abbott, has arrived. The volume—half textbook, half reference manual—assembles more than three dozen academic essays that address the question of what constitutes cult television and how a small number of smart, genre-busting shows have influenced a vast amount of our viewing material.

What counts as cult TV? Well, like the definition of the term itself, that’s a topic for productive argument. A short list might include "Star Trek", "Battlestar Galactica", "Twin Peaks", "The X-Files", "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", "Alias", "Firefly", "The Avengers" and "Lost". Herewith we’ve culled five things from Abbott’s book to ponder over on the subject of television.

On where it all began:

The origin of cult-TV appreciation can be placed in the period following the debut of "Star Trek" in 1966, when the show teetered on the brink of cancellation and was rescued from a premature death by ardent letter-writing campaigns organised by fans.  read more »

The main requirement of good reality television is that its cast members emanate force fields of charisma. The main requirement of a television-elimination challenge is that its competitors display visible and varying talents. When a show incorporates both of these television tropes—as Bravo's new series "Work of Art" does—its participants had better deliver on both the talent and charisma counts. There's also the matter of the judges, who must be articulate, eminent in their field, and capable of salty soundbites. Finally, the prize must be truly covetable. But just because the ingredients of a top-tier reality show are identifiable doesn't mean they're easy to amass into something watchable.

"Work of Art", which premiered on June 9th, is an interesting case study. The judges include Jerry Saltz, art critic for New York magazine, and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, a curator. Simon de Pury, the former chairman of Sotheby's Europe, serves as a mentor, and Sarah Jessica Parker is executive producer. The contestants are sexy and talented, for the most part, and the winner gets a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum plus $100,000. "Work of Art", in other words, fulfils the formula. But there's a snag.  read more »

Works of art often rely on support, financial or otherwise, to reach the public. Eddie Morgan, head of the BBC College of Production and former editor of BBC2’s “Culture Show”, and Jonathan Meades, a writer and broadcaster, continue our Intelligent Life mini-series on classics that might not get a green light today.

WAYS OF SEEING, THE BIG POLITICAL INTERVIEW,  NOGGIN THE NOG

The only constant in television is change. Changes in technology, economics, demographics, public policy, regulation, public taste, sheer fashion—all combine to drive ceaseless change in what is made and watched.

There’s a host of terrible programmes of the past that would not even be contemplated today: “The Black and White Minstrel Show” (pictured)—rubbish plus racism, which attracted audiences of 15m+ in the 1960s. Or “That’s Life”, “The Good Old Days”, and the wrestling that used to fill long Saturday afternoons. There is no longer a big family audience for such weird, confected blandness. The other side of this coin is a coyness about sensitive issues. Catching the occasional snippet of Johnny Speight’s “Till Death Us Do Part”, I’m staggered at Alf Garnett’s reactionary racism. It’s funny, shocking, sad and kind of true, not drivel like the Minstrels. But I suspect that a Speight of today would be quickly shown the door.  read more »

Happy birthday to YouTube, which recently celebrated its fifth anniversary. According to the video site's official blog, this birthday coincides with an important milestone: it now lures over two billion views a day, nearly double the prime-time audience of the three top American television networks combined, the site swiftly adds.

YouTube is sometimes hounded for being the natural product of all of our most craven instincts. Instead of watching quality programming on television, say, we are all narcissistically posting videos of our dancing babies and puking cats in the hopes of becoming famous. Though Joel Budd at The Economist makes a convincing case for television's sustained hegemony, it's clear that something more interesting is going on here. The promise of an audience is enough to motivate most anyone to take out a camera and capture something (Anne Trubek made a similar argument for blogging and writing). People are creating work and engaging with each other. The result is that everyone becomes a producer, not just a consumer—something that Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink consider in this insightful conversation in the latest issue of Wired.  read more »

M.I.A., a British musician, has stirred up controversy with her latest music video, the nearly nine-minute "Born Free", which features nudity, drugs and the ruthless execution of redheads at the hands of apparently American soldiers. What's interesting, however, is not the way it has divided media and her fans (YouTube apparently pulled it off its site owing to its brutal content), but that it highlights a growing trend in the way music is promoted.

Not so long ago, the music video was dying. Opportunities for broadcast on television were limited, label revenues were falling and the video was a luxury many couldn't afford. Broadband internet has given the format a new lease of life. But where before videos remained in thrall to the song's subject matter or sensibility—such as with Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Two Tribes"—the connection between video and music has become more tenuous than ever. Indeed, the song is nearly incidental: the closest M.I.A. gets to her video's content is a declaration that "I got something to say". What that is remains inconsequential.  read more »

Fashion has a new star, and she's no Anna Wintour. Kelly Cutrone is the founder of People's Revolution, a fashion public-relations and marketing firm, and the star of "Kell on Earth", a relatively new reality show on Bravo about her life. She is also the author of a new book, "If You Have to Cry, Go Outside". On the surface, Cutrone is another powerful fashion bitch of the type we relish in life (Wintour) and in fiction ("The Devil Wears Prada"). But this doesn't explain her cult following among those who can't tell Anne Klein from Alexander Wang.

The Cutrone package involves a sharp tongue, black clothing, a lack of makeup and a personal aspect that invokes both Skeletor and a den mother. Her book—part-memoir, part-business manual, part-spiritual journey—both reinforces and explains her appeal. "If I had to describe my DIY religion, I'd say that I'm a Hindu-esque Tantric Toltec Priestess, which you've never heard of because I made it up," she writes. She embraces both severe business practices and Eastern mysticism, recreational drugs and capitalism, clothing and goddess-worship. Her intelligence makes these contradictions fascinating.  read more »

In The Economist this week, Joel Budd (interviewed here) considers the way television has clung on as an incredibly successful mass medium, even as time and new technology has hurt the music and newspaper industries.

In the final quarter of 2009 the average American spent almost 37 hours a week watching television. Earlier this year 116m of them saw the Super Bowl—a record for a single programme. Far from being cowed by new media, TV is colonising it.

Television is more dominant than ever. What's curious (and what this videographic captures below) is the way we underestimate just how much television we watch, and overestimate our consumption of online video.

Do most people underestimate their viewing time because it is so passive (and therefore it hardly registers as time spent), or because of a latent sense of shame? And what explains the enduring, record-breaking popularity of the Super Bowl, year after year?

Over the holidays I found myself spending a lot of time with a new series on MTV called "Teen Mom", averaging one good cry per episode. The show follows girls from series "16 and Pregnant" which aired this summer presumably as part of an attempt by MTV to make their programming more meaningful in post-"Juno" (and post-housing bust) America, where teen pregnancy is on the rise. The babies have been had, and the mother's experiences make up the new show.

Gina Bellafante of the New York Times panned the original show as "working-class voyeurism". She complained that MTV had simply traded in the rich princesses of "My Super Sweet 16" for their fast-food-eating, southern-accented, pauper equivalents. It's certainly not a perfect slice of life: of "Teen Mom"'s four subjects (culled from the six girls on "16 and Pregnant"), three are white and one seems to be biracial, even though Latinas have the highest incidence of teen pregnancy. And there is no mention of abortion (though an especially heartbreaking storyline involves giving up a baby for adoption).  read more »