"Title This" on TV

It's Wednesday. What will you do tonight? Mark Kostabi's "Title This," once known as "Name That Painting," is on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network. If you don't live in Manhattan, you can watch it online here.

Kostabi was a "leading figure in the East Village art scene" and is now a "provocative media persona" (those are his own words), and this weekly cable television show features a rotating panel of contestants with ties to the art world who suggest titles for Kostabi's canvases, which are produced factory-style by his team of "idea people" and assistants. If this seems like bald self promotion, that's because it is, and Kostabi makes no bones about his ambitions. Whether they're genuine or Warholian schtick is anyone's best guess. (Some people don't like, that's for sure. Of Kostabi's 2002 show at Stefan Stux, Ken Johnson wrote, "Looking at this, one imagines that if Mr. Kostabi would really probe his own Oedipal and narcissistic rage instead of trying so hard to be outrageously clever, something interesting might happen.") Figure Painting thinks it's entertaining, if nothing else.

In this episode, musician Jerry Marotta outwits art critic Adrian Dannatt and Artnet Magazine editor Walter Robinson:

View past shows, whose contestants include Cay Sophie Rabinowitz (one of the new directors of Art Basel), Bob Guccione, Jr. (founder of music magazine Spin), Bonnie Fuller (the tabloid queen), and Michel Gondry (the well-known director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind who was kicked out of art school) here.