Untitled Art Project

July 18, 2009, 11:00 PM ET
Do Starving Artists Look Like This? Bravo Holds Casting Call for Arty New Reality Show


Television’s most successful reality competitions have tackled pop-culture pursuits like singing and dancing, but Bravo has begun scouring for 13 competitors who are talented with a paintbrush.
Earlier today in New York, Bravo and Sarah Jessica Parker’s production company Pretty Matches held an open casting call for “The Untitled Art Project,” a show that will ask wannabe Picassos to compete in a variety of artistic styles for a gallery show, cash and a national tour. The reality show will film in New York in September and may air sometime next year, according to casting director Nick Gilhool.
Around 350 aspiring art stars turned up at the White Columns Gallery to audition before a panel of judges that included auctioneer Simon de Pury, who said he was determined not to be the show’s “mean judge.” (Ms. Parker didn’t participate in this selection round.)


Other artists in line included Jo Owens Murray, 56, a self-taught Surrealist from Collegeville, Penn., who used cast-off jewelry to create a confectionary mosaic on her mannequin sculpture, “side show,” and Virgil Wong, a Manhattan artist who donned a white lab coat to talk about how his conceptual art involves avatars and robotic pills. (In real life, Mr. Wong is director of the web center at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.)



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