Many thanks to Alyssa for asking me to help tend the shop while she’s off in the Alaskan wilderness. I can’t wait to hear the stories she brings back.

I was hooked on RuPaul’s Drag Race after the first episode. In addition to watching the transformations of each superdrag diva, it’s really refreshing to see a realilty show that embraces its theatricality and inherent campiness. The catfights and tears maybe weren’t all real, but every queen on the show had real talent–those girls put in serious work with their makeup and costumes. When I heard that LOGO was creating another drag show, I was all in. Until I heard the premise.

Drag U is a show that helps women discover their fierceness, with makeovers conducted by the mistresses of illusion, former Drag Race contestants. RuPaul is the women’s camp counselor and drill sargeant–and while he hasn’t appeared in drag in the first three episodes, he’s also a mother figure. It’s a show that teaches women to celebrate their womanhood. And the teachers are men.

I have to admit to being a little uneasy about that at first–how could a man teach a woman how to be…a woman? And drag is all about illusion, about creating someone new and larger than life. Every week, three contestants are cinched and painted and pressed into hyperfemininity, a caricature. What life lessons are women supposed to learn here…?

Oddly–and maybe even successfully–Drag U attempts to give women a chance to unveil their wildest, most fantastical selves. The competition portion of the show includes a live audience of the contestants’ family and friends. RuPaul plays host to this talk show, introducing each contestant’s new persona and asking her how she’ll use what she’s learned in real life. It’s like a weird cross between Dr. Phil and American Idol, each woman experiencing self-discovery through fake lashes and sequined gowns.

Of a piece, the show is a fun and daring take on the images of women on TV. That drag and gay culture are becoming mainstream is an encouraging sign–and maybe it’s a sign that gender roles aren’t as fixed as they’ve been in the past. A man may not be able to teach womanhood, but he can teach fierceness.

Thanks so much to Alyssa for having me on while she’s adventuring in Alaska.

Let me first say that “Work of Art” is not about art. I do not tune in to learn anything about art or art history. The “art” produced by the contestants isn’t interesting or even on the level of most art students at most major universities. In short, the art on this show is bad and probably shouldn’t even be classified as such. But what “Work of Art” is good at is the genre of reality television. It’s ridiculous, absurd, and hugely entertaining.

Work of art, if you haven’t been sucked in to its post-”Top Chef DC” time slot, has the same premise as its preceding show or Project Runway: The idea is to get artists to put something together along some kind of theme in a few hours and have a gallery showing to see what “works.” Last night’s episode was the last before the show’s finale next week.

[Aside: "Top Chef DC" is possibly its dullest iteration to date. You would have thought having someone with a Michelin star on this season would have made it more interesting, but instead you get a lot of mostly competent but wholly uninteresting chefs.]

The constants on “Work of Art” are weird, narcissistic, dysfunctional, and erratic (or at least, that’s how the show is edited to make them look). An artist friend of mine worried the show might make people think artists are stupid. After watching this show, I think this is a completely legitimate fear. So please let me assure the casual observer of the show: Artists are not stupid. These “artists” on “Work of Art,” however, just might be.

Peregrine often takes it upon herself to dress like an alien. Miles, who recently graduated from my alma matter, the University of Minnesota, comes off as a bit OCD and often takes competition time to nap because he feels “overwhelmed.” (Some of my friends have expressed that Miles might be the closest to an actual artist on the show.) Jaclyn somehow manages to make the judges think she’s making provocative “feminist” art by photographing herself naked in nearly every challenge including the challenge where she was supposed to design a book cover for Pride and Prejudice. In fact, last night Jaclyn was voted off for a piece in which she didn’t include naked (or semi-naked) photographs of herself.

[Yet another aside: Let me just say that I'm not blaming Jaclyn for being too "slutty" or anything like that. I genuinely believe that women taking control of their own sexuality is a good thing. But Jaclyn's pieces seems to completely ignore much of feminist criticism and philosophy. She once earnestly included "the Male Gaze" into one of her pieces -- and not really in a critical way. I find some of the judges classification of Jaclyn's work as "feminist" to be problematic at best and find her evaluation of human sexuality and body image (especially considering that she appears to have undergone a breast augmentation surgery) to be stunted.]

But the beauty of “Work of Art” isn’t just in its characters contestants. The episode in which they were supposed to make “shocking art,” inspired by photographer Andres Serrano (most famously known for his Piss Christ), is possibly the funniest thing I have seen in a long time. I won’t even attempt to summarize the episode, since it’s actually worth watching on your own — or at the very least, reading this post from Melissa McEwan at Shakesville — but let me just say: Shit panda, Walt Disney erections, and cum. So much cum.

What “Work of Art” has hit upon here is not the next Project Runway or the next Top Chef. Instead, they accidentally created a show that looks back to the 2000-2002 era of reality television. By using the premise of a competition, they’re revealing some of the most absurd aspects of human nature.

It’s true that there are a lot of really disgusting elements in reality television: The cheap production costs, the manufactured nature of the conflicts, and the deeply integrated sexism (including extreme disproportion of white male winners on nearly every show). I totally respect and am grateful to those who call on producers to stop making this crap. Still, there’s a reason there’s an audience for reality television, however uncomfortable that reason might be. On some level, people enjoy watching this crap. It certainly sucked me in, and I’m supposed to have some kind of refined feminist sensibility.

In the end “Work of Art” is definitely not about art, but it is about perfecting the art of reality television.

Thanks to Alyssa for having me; this should be a fun week.

In advance of Lollapalooza this weekend, Steven Hyden and Kyle Ryan of the AV Club have a great back-and-forth on the virtues of summer music festivals. Hyden comes down solidly on the Rosenberg/Matthews side of “concerts should not be physically uncomfortable”. Ryan defends festivals, and ended up conceding most of Hyden’s criticisms. Here’s him on why you just need to wear the right clothes to enjoy them:

My festival uniform: T-shirt, cargo shorts (to carry sun block, notebook, etc.), hat, sunglasses, and old running shoes. Shoes are the most critical; it baffles me when people wear flip-flops to festivals. They give you no support on a day when you’re on your feet for hours, and expose your feet to getting stepped on, sunburned, and dripped on by any number of liquids. Terrible idea. Also critical: shorts, and I don’t care if you think you’re too cool for them. You won’t care how cool you look when black jeans make your legs feel like gyro meat roasting on a spit. Plus, it’s all going to get disgustingly dirty; don’t wear anything unless you can live without it come Monday morning. You can’t do anything about the weather, but you really have no one to blame but yourself if you’re uncomfortable.

This is true, perhaps, but not much of a defense. Ryan’s essentially conceding that to enjoy a concert you have to fine getting filthy and being ridiculously hot, which amounts to a fairly convincing case against them for those of us who aren’t fond of filthiness or ridiculous heat.

What’s more, I’d go further than Hyden and say that this is not a problem just with festivals, but with club concerts too. Monday’s Robyn/Kelis concert, as Alyssa said at The Atlantic, was overcrowded, hot, dirty, and overall physically uncomfortable, as indeed most sold-out club shows are. And that show was perhaps the best case for rock clubs versus places with seating, since one presumably one wants to dance to “Milkshake” (or, in this case, a “Holiday”/”Milkshake”/”Pon de Floor” medley). But one had about two inches of personal space, at best, so dancing wasn’t really in the cards.

Obviously, there are disadvantages to sit-down shows. Putting in seating costs more, for one, and it can make it harder to stay engaged. I love Grizzly Bear, but even then I nodded off during the middle of their set at Orpheum, a seated venue. And some shows really, truly wouldn’t work seated. The whole point of seeing Major Lazer live is to see Skerrit Bwoy being a safety hazard; at the show I went to, he didn’t just stage dive, he jumped onto ceiling pipes in the club and proceeded to climb them like monkey bars before jumping directly on top of me and start dancing again. But seated shows don’t rule out the possibility of crowd interaction; usually, some people will crowd just under the stage to dance, and if the seats are at enough of an incline, everyone can still watch the show. The times when I feel like that experience offsets feeling like my legs are going to break in half are few and far between, and I wouldn’t mind throwing an extra $20 at a band so I can relax while watching them play.

Ladies and germs, as you read this, I’m on my way to Anchorage, AK, and then to Unalaska. And let me tell you, after the hellaciously hot summer we’ve had here in DC, being out in the Bering Sea sounds awesome. But I’d never leave you all alone. 


Coming back from their guest stints here this May are BabylonSista and Katherine. BabylonSista writes at political blog Conversation 101 and her own home on the net, Confessions of a Cybernegress. A lifelong Midwesterner, she spends her free time nerding out on sci-fi, experimenting in the kitchen, and trying to hide her new love of fashion. Katherine is a New Hampshire-based writer and taxonomist. She blogs about books, TV, food, knitting, and whatever else catches her interest at Kat with a K.


And there are are two new additions for this outing. Kay Steiger is the editor of Campus Progress, and a prolific, tough, funny feminist freelancer as well—and a long-time Friend of the Blog. Dylan Matthews is a junior at Harvard working part-time at the Washington Post. He DJs for the Record Hospital at WHRB 95.3. And he’s also my frequent partner in pop culture, be it ironic Eclipse-viewing, or braving the crowd at Robyn concerts.


I know you’ll enjoy their company here as much as I enjoy it in real life. The usual rules about being excellent to each other apply.