It’s about time we got caught up on Work of Art, don’t you think? Lots of great artists have been eliminated these past few weeks, and one crappy one has not.  Let’s get to it!

Week 6

Dusty is still bitter about the last challenge. Can you blame him? He’s an elementary school art teacher with a new family trying to make it as an artist. $20,000 would have bought a lot of baby formula. Instead, Young is padding his already huge short-shorts fund. I feel for the guy – I thought his piece was a lot stronger than Young’s as well. The mullet will have his day.

Sara J randomly asks Young if he’d massage her vagina. Good luck there, Sara. You’re asking the one person in the studio who actively avoids having to touch vagina.

So after the artists mourn the irreplaceable Bayete, they’re taken to a dirty alley for their next challenge.

Who dresses this woman? It’s like she shows up to this show every week after another reality show called “America’s Next Top Mentally Disturbed Fashion Designer.”  She still manages to look pretty fine despite her silly costumes. I’d like to make like Nixon and open relations with China, if you know what I mean.

Grab a can of spray paint and get to work on this lady – each artist is being matched with the person with whom they share the same color paint.

Sucklord chooses green and makes China extremely uncomfortable.

Who didn’t see that coming?

Hey, since we’re drawing tits on this broad, Simon decides to join in on the sexual harassment.

So they wait until Tewz the street artist is eliminated to have their first real street art challenge. I bet he enjoyed seeing the artists participate in his specialty from his couch. The artists are given the task of making their impression on a massive outdoor wall space in Brooklyn. Dusty is paired with his archnemesis Young, Sara J is working with Kymia, Sucklord  with Sarah K, and Michelle gets stuck with Lola.

Lola begins to sabotage Michelle off the bat by suggesting they create a party scene that prominently features tiger penises. Michelle tentatively asks if they might have made too many dicks. Lola assures her that you can never have too many dicks. She tells a little story about how her mother used to drag her along to cut to the front of lines just so they wouldn’t have to wait like socially healthy human beings. And yet another piece of the puzzle falls into place.

“Penises are so much fun!” – Michelle. Damn you and your slutty influence, Lola!

Kymia and Sara find common ground when they realize they are both 1^st generation Americans from families that have been uprooted from their homeland. Their concept begins to materialize easily from that point on.

Dusty and Young are having trouble connecting and forming an idea. They go home confused and slightly worried. Hopefully they – hey!

That doesn’t look like her usual cigarettes. You can do that on TV now?

Anyway, Young and Dusty realize they do find something to relate about – one of them lost a father recently while the other became one. That’s some deep, life-altering shit. They wisely decide to make it  the subject of their piece.

Sucklord and the cutie with a booty design a maze-like graphical composition while Lola and Michelle are mean to Kymia for no reason. “Kymia is constantly asking for permission… it just kind of bothers me,” says Lola. Yeah, it really bothers me when people politely ask for my permission to use our common work space. It’s just so annoying and inconsiderate when they interrupt my important work drawing tiger dicks to ask me when they can have a turn using a tool that they have equal access to. Their tears fill me with a sense of importance and power that I can’t achieve through my work. Cry, wench! I want to taste your delicious tears of sorrow! After that I’m going to cut to the front of a line and laugh when people are too civilized to challenge me on it! Then I’m going to flirt with a man old enough to be my father, and then I’m going to make shitty art! Rowr!

“Lola is one of those girls I tend to stay away from.” – Sarah K. Good girl.

The tiger dicks start to come together on the wall. After viewing Doung’s father piece, and Saria’s uprooted piece, Simon seems confused and disappointed with the strange, hypersexual bizarrofest that’s taking place on Michola’s wall.

…and yet again Lola decides to completely dismiss Simon’s critique. …and yet again, she begins scribbling text over her drawings. That’s what the judges get for encouraging her last time. Prepare to see a lot more of that shit.

Can we stop this review to say something about Young’s shorts? Does he really have to subject people to that?

Not only does Dusty have to lose to this guy week after week, he has to be exposed to his hairless nuggets as well. Talk about adding insult to injury.

The exhibition begins, and all-in-all each team’s work looks good. I’m pretty impressed with Dusty and Young’s  piece, as well as Sara and Kymia’s. Saria’s tale of relocation is relatable and fairly easy to comprehend, although I don’t understand why they made the white figure look like a space alien when he’s supposed to represent the forces of uprooting and migration. Still, it’s striking and fits well onto the wall space.

Lola, in a characteristically despicable move, hands out stickers and encourages guests to place them on the other artists’ walls. Not only does this miserable cretin make an ugly disappointment of a piece herself, but she decides to infect other peoples’ art with her brand of no-talent shit as well. The way she laughs about degrading Sara and Kymia’s sensitive family piece is just vile and makes me want to slap her harder than usual.

I thought this was a pretty close race between Doung and Saria. In the end the judges gave it to the dudes. I liked the way Dusty and Young composed the piece, the windows of the building acted as panels of a comic and their ideas converged in the center to answer a common question about two experiences that most human beings share in their lives at one point or another. I felt that having an area that people can write in their own thoughts takes away from the impact of the central, unifying concept though, and that the piece would have been even stronger without that element. Dusty finally makes some cash for his family though, and Young throws his winnings into his big ol’ pile of money.

Remaining true to all things Lola touches, her team’s piece was just ugly. “’Exceptionally Hideous’ should be the proper title,” says the guest judge.

It lacks any sort of meaning or narrative, it’s profane, and is not even aesthetically pleasing in any way. I’m sad for Michelle that she had anything to do with this. It’s not even close to the level of her usual work.

Amazingly, this wasn’t the piece that lost. Poor Sucklord and Sarah K. are criticized overly harsh, in my opinion.

It certainly has a “street” vibe, has a raw texture, and is kind of fun to look at. It may not be the most profound piece in the competition, but it’s way better than Tigerdicks. The saddest part is how Sucklord says this is the most confident he’s felt in the whole competition, right before he’s eliminated from the show.

How sad. Just when I was actually starting to like the guy. None of his art really moved or impressed me, but the impression I had of him was starting to change from weird narcissist to big goofy kid before my eyes.  I was hoping he’d be able to come up with one cool piece before he was eliminated, at least. I love that he went out with a quote from Star Wars (one of the good ones).

Oh well – I’m sure he’ll suck it up. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Week 7

Lola humbly volunteers to take on the responsibility of becoming the “loud and obnoxious one” now that Sucklord is gone.  I don’t know about loud, but she’s definitely been obnoxious since Day 1, and I don’t think she can increase the amount of obnoxiousness that she’s outputting or the annoyance I’m feeling with her remaining on the show week after week as talented artists get eliminated before her . I truly won’t be satisfied until Lola is eliminated once and for all. Even Simon is baffled that Lola’s skin was saved this week yet again…

The sponsor for this week’s challenge is Fiat, so the artists are challenged to make a piece of art from a piece of car. Half of these artists are completely unfamiliar with cars in general. This is New York! As one observant New New Yorker once said, “nobody drives in New York, there’s too much traffic.”  When Fiat’s paying the big bucks, though, it’s the artist’s duty to appease their patron. They scramble to gather the pieces that will ultimately end up in their work.

The challenge is pretty open-ended, the only parameter being that you must somehow incorporate a piece of the car into the work. It was very entertaining seeing where each artist’s mind took them during this challenge.

Kymia gets this bizarre idea to take the key to the car, grind it down into bits and build a kaleidoscope that will serve as a metaphor for the “key to the universe.” The concept sounds way too abstract even this early on, and that’s always a recipe for disaster.

Dusty is reminded of a childhood car accident in which his aunt got a face-full of steering wheel, so he decides to make a mold of his face and plant it in the steering wheel. I’d be claustrophobic in this mold. It’s a good thing his air holes didn’t clog up while Kymia was going on about her crummy star box. But he doesn’t die, and Dusty is set down next to a bottle of Vaseline and asks to be retrieved in exactly 7 minutes, which is about my average as well.

Michelle reverts to her traditional practice of brightly colored paper sculpture. Suspended from the ceiling, the piece resembles a floating person with the flesh removed and the innards on display. I think it’s striking and looks pretty good, although Simon’s comments about it looking like something made for the children’s challenge makes her second-guess herself, which is disappointing. She ends up abandoning that project all together.

Did I mention Lola’s a witch? She’s a witch, everybody. Her grandma was a witch and taught her some “witchy ways,” so now she can “make things happen” when she wants them to. Is she being sarcastic? I honestly can’t tell anymore.  I’ll just use Sara J’s eyebrow super-crinkle that she uses when she’s trying to look thoughtful to express how I feel about Lola at this very moment.

Everyone’s off to such a rocky start. Kymia’s piece is not coming together to form a working kaleidoscope and Simon suggests that she consider abandoning it. Dusty’s steering wheel project is underwhelming and unimpressive and Simon suggests that he consider abandoning it. Michelle’s piece is kind of silly looking and Simon suggests that she… you guessed it… consider abandoning it.

In the end, Dusty and Michelle come up with completely different concepts right before the show. Dusty’s is text in the style of tire tracks, a commentary on the monotony of the average American’s daily commute. Michelle is not so fortunate. She makes… this:

I am so disappointed in Michelle’s piece this week. It’s a goofy paper sculpture that’s a very ugly contrast against the original car’s parts, it feels shoddily put together, and communicates nothing. One judge points out that Michelle was in a prime position to use her car crash experience to make a meaningful piece. She’s drawn on that experience before for her previous work, though… I don’t think it’s fair to criticize an artist for not using a traumatic experience simply because there’s a superficial connection with the exhibition’s theme.

The funny thing, though, is that the other two pieces Michelle constructed were much stronger and probably would have spared her… *gasp* elimination! Say it isn’t so! Michelle was my early favorite to go all the way. Now she’s making paper sculptures in her kitchen to sell on Etsy while Lola survives yet another week. That doesn’t stop the judges from shitting on her before she’s allowed to leave, though. She’s chastised for repeating the same mistakes. Then why didn’t you eliminate her? At least Michelle’s mistake was new!

Anyway, Sara J wins the prize after making a badass sculpture out of a muffler. This review is getting so long! On to week 8…

Week 8

Lola says she needs to put more of herself out there to show the judges who she really is. So naturally, that means this:

The artists are paired up to sell as much of their art on the street as they can. It’s Work of Art meets The Apprentice. Sara J picks the perennial winner Young as her teammate,  Dusty and Kymia pair up, which leaves Sarah K. with Lola. Lola mentions having to tweeze her lady mustache and not grooming her nether-regions, that she would “do almost anything” to win, and jokes that she would take her top off for $100 all within 30 seconds. I can’t even make jokes about the shit this woman says anymore, she’s beginning to parody herself.

Then Young describes his butt in disturbing detail…

So everyone gets to making their knickknacks with the goal of selling them on the street in mind. Almost everyone is making a T-shirt of some kind, Young gets to work making sexy underwear that his round, perky butt (his words) would fit in, Dusty and Kymia make cards that read “Support Artists,” and Sarah K. starts drawing dicks. What is this strange, cock-centered influence Lola is able to make on people that are near her? Does she radiate some kind of cock-aura?

Lola does reveal some secrets about herself in her work, which basically confirm my opinion that she is a terrible person in addition to being a crummy artist.

…and Bravo gets away with a cheap booty shot when Lola exposes herself.

Kymia criticizes her for getting naked, even though she got nude for a piece early on in the competition herself.

Lola’s piece is clever in a way, selling secrets about herself that get incrementally more revealing based on how much the customer pays, but using her tits and her hairy twat is a pretty cheap way of getting people’s attention. Also, the piece itself is pretty damn ugly. Purple text in an ugly font on top of a very unflattering naked photo of a mentally challenged person looking bored. Yuck.

Sara J is making a killing off of personalized watercolor portraits. They look rad and she gathers an audience to watch her work.

Lola sells a secret to a little girl for 25 cents…

…And her mother drags her away in tears. “I told her a really good secret!” Scarring, even!

“I can see your ill-nana over there,” says Young. Yeah, everyone can. All the time. They actually won’t stop showing it.

I think they’ve flashed Lola’s bush two dozen times already. I never thought I’d be sick of seeing a woman’s naked body, but I am so revolted by Lola as a person in general that the less I see of her, the better.

The judges are eating it up, though. They see the nudity as Lola “pushing” herself as an artist, as a way to draw people in before sharing something deeper with them. Art critics, ugh…

Sara J and Young win the challenge in terms of dollars made, largely thanks to Sara’s portraiture, so they’re safe. Who goes home today?

The judges seem to dislike Sarah K’s and Dusty’s pieces the most. Dusty created, what I consider, a clever take on a street sign that depicts the surveillance society that America might be transforming into. I like Dusty’s work because he executes a concept really well. The color and outline make this sign feel realistic, just like his fast food trash bin.

Sarah K. makes some construction paper headdresses sitting atop abstract nudie drawings.

One judge called it “disposable.” I hate to say it, but I agree. This is not a great piece of work, and I can’t imagine wanting to pay money for one of those headdresses.

I’m very sad that they chose Sarah K. for elimination. Her work was always pretty good, but I really enjoyed her upbeat personality and cute-as-hell smile and demeanor. You will be missed, Sarah. Why couldn’t it have been Lola??

Oh, right.