Midwest Voices

Barb Shelly

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Good luck to Peregrine Honig, the brave Kansas City artist who is a finalist in Bravo network’s “Next Great Artist” reality show. The winner, to be named tonight, will receive a $100,000 cash prize and a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York.

As the Star’s Alice Thorson reports, the upper echelons of the art work find the idea of a network-based artists’ competition repulsive.

Many art lovers and numerous critics cringe at the show’s premise. “Art is weirdly useless and unquantifiable,” Village Voice art critic Christian Viveros-Fauné wrote in a recent column. “It’s not like dresses and food or whatever else can be lassoed into a TV competition.” Adds Linda Lighton, a prominent Kansas City ceramic artist: “It almost doesn’t have anything to do with real artwork. It’s like being in art school. You have these little projects.” Star contributing reviewer Elisabeth Kirsch fumes at what she calls the “shaming sessions” at the end of each show, in which the artists are dressed down by the judges.

But I love Honig’s response: “My work deals with social structures and pop culture; I need to be ensconced in pop culture.”

Art is too often exclusive and inaccessible. Honig and her Bravo competitors are making it interesting and understandable. And her success on the show is great for Kansas City’s reputation as a arts town.

Good for her.

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