ART REALITY TV SHOW?                                            JEFFREY DEITCH'S "ARTSTAR" PROJECT: A JOKE OR HUMILIATION? PERHAPS, BOTH!

Photo: The art world of Jeffrey Deitch is more than decadence. It is outrageously vulgar and uglissimo! You are looking at Deitch's poster for  Zhang Huan nudes calendar.

New Yorker Jeffrey Deitch, a self-proclaimed art critic, art expert, art judge, and art everything is working on a crazy, grotesque and perhaps incomprehensibly clever project. An art reality show! To the well "established" art connoisseurs, academicians and experts in the field, Deitch's TV program (still an idea in its infancy) is either a joke or a mockery of art, par excellence. But, to the starving artists in New York, Deitch's ambitious plan might work. In fact, it began to work in a very bizarre way on and in  the streets and sidewalks of New York city. Struggling and desperate artists dying for recognition, an exposure, even a brief one, a career boost, a buck or two, were lined up in the streets, on the sidewalks and  around the corners of Green Street and Grand Street in SoHo, New York City. Approximately 200 artists stood there, in the streets, shivering and trembling, just to get noticed by Pope Jeffrey Deitch the First! An ad infinitum human lines and queues of artists carrying, holding and grabbing all sorts of art tools, canvases, slides, figurines, statuettes, sketches, negatives, prints, photographs, pictures, screens, albums, mini-installations, video clips, clopins-clopants... and themselves.!

All this human Caravan -Serail drama of artists reminded me of those miserable Russian peasants from Kiev and Omsk begging for a piece of bread outside the Tsar and Tsarina imperial palace. And Tsar Deitch loves the view. He felt very important. He thinks, he is en route to become the new Trump of Art Reality TV Show.  Why to blame Deitch et al and why to accuse them of "humanistico-sadistico-artistico atrocity?

Photo: Extras auditioning in the nude for Saatchi Show in London. Approximately 150 participants took part in the nude auditions. And in New York City, more than 200 starving artists waited in the streets for hours and hours to audition for Deitch.  Nothing has changed on the landscape of world art.  "Plus ca change, plus ca reste la meme chose!", meaning "The more things change, the more they remain the same."

Deitch's gang and entourage are shrewd, brilliant, pompous, arrogant and wise entrepreneurs.  Blame the artists; the modestus, ignoramus, miserablemus creative geniusesmus who willingly accepted to be humiliated by Jeffrey Dietch.. They brought on themselves a self imposed, self welcomed  indignation and humiliation. Deitch himself seems to admit this. In a statement given to the New York Times, Deitch said :"In the 1970's when I started in the art world, no self-respecting artist would have stood in line to try to get on a television show...It never would have happened." Deitch knows the deal on the wheel! Deitch is a tough cookie. A very hard one. Educated but probably not very cultured, Deitch is not that lovable and likable guy. "He is a difficult specie" told me an artist in New York. "Very hard to work for this guy", said one person who allegedly worked for Deitch. 

But why in heavens, these avalanches of souls and desperate artists stood and waited in the streets for hours and hours, under the rain and in the snow, some slept overnight in hard board boxes left by food delivery trucks on the streets sidewalks? Randy Kennedy explained the whole bizarre phenomenon :"But it led into a cavernous gallery where artists would be given a few precious moments to show their work to a panel of judges, including Mr. Deitch, and compete for the chance to land one of eight spots on the television show, which is being made as a pilot and will include seven more episodes if it is picked up. (The pilot was being made for Voom HD, a high-definition satellite network whose fate now appears uncertain, but the show's creators say they will present it to other networks.) The artists who are selected will be given a group show at Deitch Projects. And in the true spirit of reality television, one could emerge as the big winner and be given a solo show at the gallery, which has shown such established art stars as Mariko Mori and Jeff Koons."

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