There's an Art To This Game

A reality show pits artist against artist, fighting over a prize that's already been won.

- James Tarmy

The new art-world docu-competition series The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist opens with introductions. There’s a self-taught oil painter from Chicago, another painter from Northfield, Minnesota, whose work focuses on contem porary Indigenous life, and, wait—Baseera Khan? As in the same Baseera Khan who had a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum last year? And, hold on, what’s the design-world wunderkind Misha Kahn doing on the screen?

Khan, Kahn and five other artists are there to compete for the honor of a “career-defining” exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington and a $100,000 cash prize. Over the course of six episodes, these painters, sculptors, printmakers and multihyphenates create art, get judged, and do their best to inject some reality-show-style drama into the proceedings while remaining unfailingly kind and supportive to the other contestants.