I know the MTV finale and the Smithsonian Channel The Exhibition: In Search of the Next Great Artist aired over a week ago, but after experiencing my own big disappointment with the show, I was left with a burning question: Who was actually watching this show? Was it someone? I might just be the only person still talking about The exhibitionas Nielsen Media Company data indicated that most episodes of the show were below six figures in live viewership when aired.
Armed with this data, I set out to see how the reality show ranked against two shows from a decade past that could arguably be described as its predecessors: Bravo TV is clean Girls Gallery (2012) and Artwork: The Next Great Artist (2010-2011). Spoiler alert: both exploded The exhibition out of water.
THE First episode of The exhibition was the most successful of the entire season in terms of viewership, drawing around 184,000 viewers for the premiere. It’s certainly not a great start, but given that the show had the 10 p.m. graveyard slot on Fridays, it was just destined to have a low viewership from the get-go. However, even Misha Kahn’s inflatable banana sculpture was not enough to keep the public’s interest alive as the second episodeViewership dropped by 50%, only garnering ~92,000 viewers… Oops.
THE following three episodes leading to The exhibition finale hovered below the six-figure mark, although the fourth episode, which I found the most boring on each of them (and that’s saying something), amassed around 95,000 viewers. To my surprise, the penultimate episode where artists reinventing a past work had the fewest viewers on the show: ~62,000. Guess I can’t blame the ~33,000 viewers who decided to throw in the towel after the fourth episode which had owned the level excitement of a hospital waiting room.
The exhibition final broke the six-figure mark with ~111,000 viewers, but that was hardly a lucky number, as it still had 40% fewer viewers than the premiere. Yeah, that was about 111,000 of us watching and probably collectively cringing as Kenny Shachter tried to whistle.
Media contacts for The exhibition have not yet responded to Hyperallergicrequest for comment regarding the rating data provided by Nielsen.
On the other hand, the 2012 single season of Bravo TV Girls Gallery had an average audience at least five times that of The exhibition Last episode. Girls Gallery, following the careers and personal lives of seven women in their early to mid-twenties working in the art world between Manhattan and Brooklyn, premiered with just over half a million viewers, according to Nielsen. That same number of viewers stuck around for the second episode, and the show maintained a fairly consistent viewership with a few dips and jumps. Slots for Monday evenings, Girls Gallery was in direct competition with season 15 of Dinners, drive-ins and dives on the food web, The ABC Family Switched at birthand Oxygen The Bad Girls Club.
Well done TVs Artwork: The Next Great Artist seems to be the model for The exhibition given that the latter pretty much co-opted the subtitle. The challenges of the 2010 show were almost identical to that of The exhibition: 14 promising artists compete for a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and a grand prize of $100,000. The only data available for artwork viewership was the average viewership of the first and second seasons and the total viewership of the two finales. The first season that aired in 2010 had a fairly consistent rating of over a million viewers per episode, with the finale amassing nearly 1.5 million viewers. The second season was somewhat less successful overall as the show lost just over a quarter of its original viewers, but the season finale ended with a generous ~781,000 viewers. before Bravo unplugged.
So, with the premise of The exhibition copy that of artwork to a T, why was he so flopular when the other one was popular? Well, for starters, the artists were eliminated in artworkso that was probably a huge item. artwork also had more prominent “celebrity” guest judges including art critic Jerry Saltz, artist Liz Cohen, photographer Mary Ellen Mark, actress and executive producer Sarah Jessica Parker and Andres Serrano, known for his controversial and sometimes offensive takes.
Overall, the lesson is clear: if you’re going to copy someone else’s sheet, make sure you get it right or you’ll look stupid. At this point, a second season of the show has not been announced, thank goodness.
