‘Work of Art’ recap: Child’s play gets serious, with Sarah Jessica Parker

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‘Work of Art’ on Bravo took a trip back to childhood in Wednesday’s episode, pairing contestants with youngsters to create complementary pieces that spoke to the inner child in all of us. Sarah Jessica Parker, who serves as an executive producer of the reality show, put in an appearance as a guest judge for this round of the competition.

As explained by Parker and the bizarrely attired host China Chow, the week’s challenge addressed the hoary cliche about modern art: ‘My kid can do better than that.’ Each contestant was tasked to create a work of art that complemented the pieces created by their junior partners. The children in the episode were students in the Studio In the School programs in New York.

Dusty, as someone who teaches art in schools, had a considerable advantage over the competition in this round. He created an unconventional, 3-D portrait of his young partner, Kei. The artists known as Tewz and the Sucklord seemed to have the most trouble, unable to derive much inspiration from their assignment. Both ended up creating literal-minded works that had little to say about childhood.

(Spoiler alert: stop reading now if you don’t want to know who won and who was eliminated in the episode.)

In the end, the judges singled out as the best works of art those created by Dusty and Kymia, the latter of whom created a subtly disturbing portrait of a dead body with a carrot. Kymia ended up winning the round.

The loser for the week was Tewz, the street artist, whose installation about vegetative growth felt creatively dead.

The next episode of ‘Work of Art’ will take place in the newspaper world, with a trip to the New York Times. It will be interesting to see if and how the remaining contestants deal with the industry’s decline in their creative projects.

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-- David Ng