This week I stand appalled. This episode was a good example of how a reality show can take a good idea and ruin it by trying to make a challenge unnecessarily difficult and by manipulating an outcome by offering a prize that is unrelated to the basic premise of the show. No artist on the judges’ panel was the least of the offenses this week. I guess the show’s producers couldn’t locate a high-profile underwear artist who would agree to appear on camera.

The basic idea of the episode should have been to create a gallery-worthy work that could also be sold on the street; instead the challenge was to make art that you can sell on the street that can also hang in a gallery and the team that sells the most gets $30,000 and cannot be eliminated.

So, of course, every team decides to try to sell the most of something – even items with the most tenuous connection to art – since there was no reward offered for the best piece this week from an artistic standpoint. It was all about money. Oh, and since they only had 5 hours to plan and create, the audience was guaranteed to see the most crass and hideous work of the season. Mission accomplished! Every team had the same avant garde vision to sell T-shirts, which leads to the question of what are you really selling when you sell an item of clothing with something painted on it?

I really feel that this episode went off the rails. I understand that some artists – maybe many artists – will modify their work to make it more commercially viable. Some even have two tracks with one that they are driven to create due to artistic impulse and one that they know people are more likely to buy because it has more broad commercial appeal.

But any show that is touting itself as the forum for discovering the “next great artist” should at least pretend to be about the art. When you emphasize the commercial above all else (as happened in this episode), you surrender to the commodification of art that is already rampant in a consumer-driven world. Maybe I’m being too naive in expecting people in the art world to strive for a higher standard.

I will expend as much genuine effort discussing the art this week as the artists spent creating art since that wasn’t the intention of the challenge.  Only two of them created anything remotely interesting. Kymia’s was okay but would have been savaged by the judges in a regular week. Sara had the only work that satisfied the basic charge of the challenge in that it was both sold on the street as it was presented in the gallery. But her work wasn’t anything we haven’t seen from her before and didn’t add anything new to the idea of street vendor art in that you could find something similar at any street fair in the U.S.

And I really hated to see any of the artists go this week given that the challenge was unfair to each contestant as an artist. So what if Sarah created something that looked like a 2nd-grade craft project? Are spray-painted T-shirts and underwear any better?

Sorry you were kicked off this week, Sarah. You are much better than this, and the viewers know it. Your talent and passion will take you far!

And we are down to the final five and on the verge of the finale, but I’ve lost a lot of enthusiasm for the show. The next one better be good.