Right now, the Kardashians are probably the most well-known American family living in defiance of Plato’s maxim, “The greatest wealth is to live content with little.” To the voluptuous Kim and company, more is more. The very name of their reality TV show — one of their many reality TV shows — Keeping Up with the Kardashians, is a blatant celebration of accruing status, money, and power without much of a point besides staying ahead of one’s neighbors. And, perhaps, the Hiltons.
Some people are angry about this. They don’t want these valueless values to spread throughout society. They abhor the idea that Kim Kardashian — someone who got famous for essentially making a sex tape with the brother of an R&B singer, remained famous simply for being famous, and is still famous for divorcing her professional basketball-playing husband after 72 days of turbulent marriage — is one of the more prominent characters in America’s media landscape.
There are already a ton of singing contest shows on TV right now, so why not have a few modeling competitions as well? Like singing professionally, modeling is a dream job and people love to look at pretty faces as much as they love to hear fledgling singers. So far, America’s Next Top Model has been the exclusive modeling competition on television, but Vulture is exclusively reporting that E! will be taking a shot at the market by airing its own show, Scouted, beginning November 28.
The reality series will differ from Top Model in a few critical ways, for example, each competition will take place in one hour-long episode, so there will be no contestant by contestant season-long elimination like you see in Top Model. Perhaps the most striking difference is the fact that Scouted will feature talent scouts who pick out girls from a variety of locations – many of whom have never even considered a job in the modeling industry before. That might just make it worth watching, right?
Yesterday, Arrested Motion tipped us off to a pair of cheeky new phone booth interventions by TrustoCorp, a group of anonymous street art pranksters that we first told you about last year. These latest pieces — which are just as dark and clever as those altered traffic signs — are a send-up of one of our favorite guilty pleasures: reality TV shows. Click through to get a better look at the work, and if you live in New York City, keep your eyes peeled for future additions to the series.
My Fair Wedding, Say Yes to the Dress, Get Married – there is no shortage of wedding-related TV programming. Now it seems unremarkable for nearly forgotten celebrities to broadcast their wedding to strangers across the nation, sharing their fairytale ceremony with audiences who are betting on how soon the divorce papers will be filed. Here at Flavorwire, we wondered how a private milestone became such a public phenomenon, how the highly-anticipated and romantic TV unions of yesteryear became the Bridezillas of today. After the jump, check out our compressed timeline of TV weddings, from Carol and Mike Brady’s blended family to TLC’s gypsy nuptials.
If you thought reality TV had exhausted both Sarah Palin and the art world, well, you probably didn’t realize that reality TV doesn’t know the meaning of the word “exhaust.” TV Squad reports that TLC, which aired serial Palin infomercial Sarah Palin’s Alaska, will air a two-part special about Beehive, the salon where the former governor and VP candidate gets her hair done. Apparently, the draw of the show is “the personalities of the owner and her staff,” which “are as big as the hairstyles they create.” (We assume this means that some of them are gay.) Big Hair Alaska debuts September 20th. Now, excuse us while we pitch a show about the deli where Obama used to buy cigarettes in Chicago.
Meanwhile, clear across America and deep inside the cerulean heart of a blue state, Bravo has announced Paint the Town, a reality series about gallerinas — the pretty young things who staff the front desks of Chelsea galleries. ANIMAL has posted a lengthy chunk of the press release, which spins the cast as ambitious women who “manage the stress of their demanding bosses, and struggle to get ahead in a business with so few opportunities to rise up the ranks” while maintaining a social life that includes “the hippest clubs, bars and art scene functions.” Ugh. We’re exhausted already.
Last night on American Idol, Iggy Pop exploded onto the stage to give a shirtless performance of “Real Wild Child (Wild One)” and dance around like a hyperactive four-year old at a Chuck E. Cheese’s birthday bash. Weird, right? Not only that American Idol is still on the air or that the 63-year-old Pop is allowed to be so chillingly shirtless on live network TV, but that the suburban-mom favorite hasn’t yet been prescribed the programming equivalent of Valium. Because, really, this isn’t the show’s first foray into the quaint town of WTF-ville, USA. After the jump, we count some of American Idol’s craziest moments. This one’s for you, Paula Abdul: You made it okay for men and women everywhere to act clinically insane on reality TV.
Over a year ago, an casting call popped up on Craigslist seeking “Singer-Songwriters who live around and play the circuit of performance venues on the Lower East Side of New York City” for a reality show called The Scene… L.E.S. Of course, we couldn’t help but poke a little fun at downtown’s very own Jersey Shore by making our own casting suggestions. But we didn’t actually think the show would make it to the production stage (especially not with that title intact).
Lo and behold, Gothamist has tracked down a teaser for the series, which still doesn’t seem to have been picked up. As promised, we get a handful of retro/brohemian singer-songwriter types — who appear to have little to do with the exponentially more buzzed-about music scene across the East River — spouting clichés like “It’s just a part of me” and “I started; I have to finish.” The whole project seems a bit too earnest for its own good. In fact, the only moment of humor comes at the end, when one guy confirms that he really is a starving artist and asks if anyone can spare a cheeseburger. Let us know if you’d watch it in the comments.
Last Saturday’s SAT featured an essay question which is causing a storm of self-loathing among high-achieving teens because — gasp! — it was about the value of reality television. Essentially, it asked if the reality TV medium helps or hurts society, given the way it bills itself as authentic but has come to be very falsified. According to test-takers on the discussion boards at admissions-freakout website College Confidential, it’s totally unfair because American high schoolers are too intellectual to watch TV and, like, their SAT prep courses totally didn’t cover a question like this.
Originally, we thought it was a pretty manageable question, especially since students didn’t have to give reality TV more than a hat tip to flesh out the problem of authenticity in art if they didn’t want to. But then, an SAT grader leaked us* the scoring rubric for this Very Special Episode — er, Essay — and we’re now sympathizing with those poor kids! Check out what they’re up against after the jump.
After years of capturing celebrities and quasi-celebrities as art director of the shameless tabloid Star, Brooklyn-based photographer David Kimelman has embraced the habit for his new series, Reality Wanted. The portraits are a series of individuals who hope to be cast in reality shows, wearing their own clothes and given little direction in their posing and staging so they can, as Kimelman says, ”be seen in the way in which they want to present themselves to the world.”
Since all of the aspiring stars are getting their big breaks in the series, we figured we could help the whole process along and cast some of them in shows ourselves. Check out some of our favorite shots, arranged according to our own casting preferences, after the jump.
Work of Art finalist Peregrine Honig takes our intertwined obsessions with youth, fashion, and celebrity, and turns them into quirky, unsettling art.
Perhaps Kansas City’s best-known art-world export (thanks to her star turn on the Bravo reality show), Honig makes paintings, sculptural installations, and performative, fashion-based projects that combine folk-art inflections and a childlike love of color, cuteness, and baby animals with a worldly, satirical voice that’s not afraid to get profound, funny, and even scatological.
