Bravo TVs Gallery Girls

Have not seen the new show, but from the reviews, Gallery Girls looks to be much like other, shoot for the lowest common denominator in reality TV.

The New Yorker reports on the new show which follows 7 young girls trying to make their way in the NY art gallery world.

“Gallery Girls” is a new Bravo reality television series that is bad in all of the ways that reality television is usually bad. The first episode presents the petty brawling of young women in high heels as gladiatorial blood sport. It promotes a fantastically regressive vision of the social and sexual dealings of twenty-somethings. It pays bad-behavior-affirming attention to that modern mutant, the insecure narcissist, suddenly spot-lit. It strips away the nuances that make a community—in this case, the art world—interesting. Bravo’s “gallery girls” are unpaid interns at mediocre galleries, recent college grads blowing their trust funds on vaguely artistic pursuits. There’s mild nudity, there’s cattiness, there are really expensive shoes. There is practically no mention of art.

“Gallery Girls” is also a new Bravo reality television series that is good in all of the ways that reality television is usually good. Nasty girl-fights are a time-tested source of entertainment. And, like all purveyors of sweeping stereotype, the show hits on some truths. There exists, in fact, in Chelsea and Soho and Williamsburg and Bushwick, a compelling clan of young women (and men…), often of independent means, who sit all day, mostly in silence, in the icy tombs that are New York’s top galleries. A lot of them could paper the white walls around them with their advanced art-history degrees. Yet they are paid a pittance to do clerical work and look pretty, with as much of a chance of getting promoted to gallerist as I have of finding a Pollock in my attic. And I don’t have an attic.

The art market’s value has swelled; galleries and art fairs feel increasingly like boutiques and shopping malls. Joining the ranks of the fifties ladies lounging against sea-foam green Cadillacs on showroom floors, and leggy eighties game-show assistants, poofing their perms and purchasing vowels, are the “gallerinas,” who now find themselves spending long hours vamping in retail. The show was briefly named “Paint the Town,” which is a groan-inducing title. But at least it gave a better sense of the show’s focus. While real gallery girls may face tedium and menial tasks at their desks, Bravo’s gallery girls need galleries like the real housewives need husbands: as an entrée into and excuse for a life of shopping, cocktail-drinking, and backstabbing.

Source: The New Yorker