In a bold new spinoff on the popular Netflix series, the reality TV show Art Is Blind challenges participants to fall in love with an artwork, sight unseen.
“I used to care only about how the painting looked, and not how it made me feel,” said Amy, a 31-year-old art advisor from Minneapolis who agreed to participate in the first season of the show after striking out for years at art fairs in what she called a “toxic cycle.”
“I’d circle Frieze for hours on end, schmoozing with the dealers and drinking prosecco but never finding anything,” Amy recounted. Her moment of reckoning came the morning she woke up next to “one of those tacky Tony Cragg sculptures, a really ugly one.” That’s when she knew something had to change.
Amy is one of 12 collectors, gallerists, curators, and other art-world professionals hoping to find true love without the help of physical attraction. In an interview with Hyperallergic, Netflix producer Tommy Smalls said he was inspired by an old adage about art.
“A good art is hard to find,” Smalls said.
There is trouble in paradise, however, as revealed by a teaser for the first season. In one scene, Josh, a 47-year-old gallerist, can be heard giggling flirtatiously in the pods, separated from a secondary-market Julian Schnabel painting only by a wall.
But in an off-screen interview after the “reveal” — the moment when participants finally meet their artworks face-to-face — Josh admitted that the canvas from one of Schnabel’s 1980s series wasn’t his “usual type” and that he typically goes for “much more recent works.”
“In my experience, they tend to be a lot more mature, creatively, that is,” he said.
Still, Josh said there were lessons to be learned from the experiment. “I’ve been an asshole to a lot of paintings in my day,” he admitted.
Another participant, a New York art dealer named Kelly, was infuriated when she became emotionally attached to an artwork that turned out to be “a pile of junk,” in her words. She and the John Chamberlain installation did not make it to the honeymoon stage, in which contestants travel to Berlin for a controversy-ridden edition of Documenta that promises to heighten existing tensions.
