Pop Art Snark

Saturday Night Live is going through one of its sucky periods (even when Justin Timberlake is on board), but don't fret.  There is now a delirious alternative.  Sketch comedy has never been done so stylishly and meticulously as Kroll Show, Nick Kroll's funky, Pop-Art/Snark extravaganza on Comedy Central.  (They are working on Season Two right now.) 

Watching all eight episodes on-demand is like witnessing a James-Rosenquist painting diorama, with a jolt of good old-fashioned infomercial kitsch and hootspa.  The graphics on Kroll Show are 50% of the kick.  Created by Nick Kroll, Jonathan Krisel, and John Levenstein, Kroll Show has a peacock flourish that gets worked out through the way every skit looks, moves and jitters.  Krisel seems to be the main creative force behind the show's visuals.  He is one of the geniuses behind the preeminent high-style nonsense of Time and Eric's Awesome Show, Good Job and Portlandia, both TV sketch comedies that riff on, and rip off, reality-show/infomercial Day-Glo iconography and visual languages.  Krisel uses trashy graphics and jump-cuts to produce universes of junk that have both a sinister sheen and a mind-boggling verisimilitude.  Paying such close attention to pop-culture bull-shit makes the humor somehow deepen into the best kind of meaninglessness. 

Krisel is at the peak of his powers in Kroll Show, collaging bits and pieces of Bravo-TV-reality gorgeousness and cheap local TV ad desperation to frame in the equally at the-peak-of-his-powers Kroll.   Kroll's menagerie of fools includes Bobby Bottleservice, a macho-freak stand-in for all those macho-freak street-magicians and pranksters that populate almost every direct-cable network, Gil Faizon, co-host of the cable-access prank show Oh Hello, and number two of a pretentious uptown NYC senior-citizen duo that also includes Georg St. Geegland, and most incredibly the Workaholic Liz, who is the main foil to the I-Wanna-Have-a -Great Life Liz in the reality show PubLIZity. 

PubLIZity features two extremely annoying ladies running a PR firm in Los Angeles.  The un-workaholic Liz is played by the incredible Jenny Slate.  Kroll's Liz is the penultimate 21st Century Bravo-TV/E-TV reality maven, all vocal-fry, sparkly, sparkly lips sucking on big-strawed ice-coffees, constantly self-congratulating while running her fingers through her perfectly streaked blond coif.  The mannerisms and plot points of PubLIZity are so succinct and perfect they become a virus in your head.  Try watching Millionaire Matchmaker or Kim and Kourtney Take Miami after watching PubLIZity, and you'll find yourself richer for the experience.  Kroll Show mockery makes you feel more connected to what is being mocked somehow, a good-spirited meanness that allows the joke to encompass almost every aspect of media.  And the Lizes' penchant for amazeeeing cupcakes and "events" really gets at the way almost everybody lives now in this egotistical, media-soaked age.  It's excitement fetishized into a prepackaged sense of entitlement, glossy and sad and extravagant, but never satisfying.  The Lizes  are the poster-ladies for 2013 "Entrepreneurship," making sure their business-sense savvy and "brand" are always the topic of the conversations they have with possible "clients" who always end up completely underwhelmed. 

There's nothing underwhelming about Kroll Show.  It's on a shiny, ridiculous path to greatness.

"Art Is the Gap"

Bravo's Work of Art is so sad and silly I actually look forward to watching it every Wednesday night. It's not exactly like watching a car-wreck. It's more like watching a bunch of really serious-minded, old-school performance artists try to re-enact a car-wreck without knowing how funny and pathetic they look.

The show is a Top-Chef/Project-Runway pastiche that cancels out all the fun by making the prime objective Art, capital A. At least on Top-Chef/Project-Runway you have something edible or wearable to judge at the end of the day; with this gig the judgments seem totally arbitrary and anachronistic because of the totally arbitrary and anachronistic nature of the art being made. For example, trying to find a winner when the show split into two teams and designed and executed two horrible outdoor sculptures was a Waiting-for-Guffmanesque sideshow, the art-world-name-dropping judges seriously inspecting a couple of rickety-looking wooden monoliths made hastily by two groups of people trying to please them with their ingenuity and aplomb.

The contestants are from differing backgrounds, but they all seem to have been chosen to represent types: there's the feisty feminist, the art-school darling, the "outsider," etc. And the contests they all undergo to prove they are the Top Artist are on the whole dull- and literal-minded. Challenges like make art like when you were a kid, make shocking art, make art that reflects who you are. The artists on the show all go at it like what they are doing is meaningful because it has to be meaningful so they can win $10,000.

I guess what's missing from the show, and what can't be counterfeited or forced, is the fact that art as a concept and commodity is so diffuse and unconfined in the 21st Century there's no way to capture it in all its glory. Anyone trying to funnel all of art's power into an hour-long TV show ends up getting the most pathetic bits and pieces, so that art becomes a game and not a reason. A contest and not a revelation. When I go to a gallery or museum I truly appreciate the anonymity, the sense that the art was made by someone but now that process is over and here it is: mysterious and ready to be made into something else by the people who see it. On "Work of Art," the artists are just trying to get a good grade, and that sad lack of ambition creates parody.

But still I enjoy watching the thing because it reminds me of what art is not: not a contest, not an A+ or B-.

Marcel Duchamp once said, "It's not what you see that is art, art is the gap."

Maybe that should be the next "Work of Art" challenge: "Artists, don't make any art today. Just make a gap."