The art market is a tough place to survive these days, with even megagalleries like Gagosian and Pace shuttering locations and cutting loose artists, and every day seeming to bring news of another art gallery calling it quits.
So maybe, counterintuitively, this is the perfect moment for the BBC to launch a new reality show that aims to incubate the next great art-dealing duo. The Big Deal with Steph McGovern, which debuts this week, sees “seven pairs of aspiring art dealers battle it out for the chance to win £50,000 [about $67,500] worth of British art.” The series aims to “pull back the curtain” on the art market, says BBC Arts head Suzy Klein, offering “a fresh insight into how art is discovered, bought, and sold.”
Reality television has in the past tried to capture what makes for great artists and, despite signing on high-wattage experts, has failed spectacularly.
Dealer Jeffrey Deitch tried first, with Artstar, on the Gallery HD network, as early as 2005, with guests including curator Debra Singer, critic Carlo McCormick, and performance art guru RoseLee Goldberg. Writing for Slate, Dushko Petrovich called Deitch “mostly charmless” and said the show felt like “an upscale infomercial” for the dealer himself. Bravo premiered Work of Art: The Next Great Artist in 2010, with judges including dealers Jeanne Greenberg and Bill Powers and critic Jerry Saltz. In The Stranger, Jen Graves wrote, “the show was horrible. Really, truly awful.” MTV followed up in 2023 with the nearly identically titled The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist, which featured insiders like then–Hirshhorn Museum director Melissa Chiu and writer Sarah Thornton. Annie Irish wrote for ARTnews that the show “falls flat on its face.”
Can aspiring art dealers also make for terrible television?
McGovern is a journalist and TV presenter who has worked on financial news and business news programs and whose father is an artist, Eamonn McGovern. “It’s like The Apprentice for the art world,” she says in press materials, “but the deals are all real, and it’s as much about the hustle as it is about art.”
A stranger aspiration could hardly be dreamed of for The Big Deal. The Apprentice was, of course, the long-running reality show hosted for 14 seasons by then–New York real estate developer and now second-term US president (and convicted fraudster and adjudicated sexual assaulter) Donald Trump, which introduced his tagline, “You’re fired!” The show is notorious, in retrospect, for promoting a vision of Trump, who even failed to run a profitable casino, as a successful businessman, the identity on which he ran for president.
Pitching in as the series mentor, coaching the aspiring dealers, is Cordelia de Freitas, director since 2021 of the Aqua Art Miami fair, who has over the course of her career also worked at several art galleries. Asked about the one artwork she would own if money were no object, she cites Paolo Uccello’s painting The Battle of San Romano (ca. 1435–1440), from the Uffizi, which she compares to “something out of the Simpsons” because “the horses just look so wrong.” But, she says, “God loves a trier.”
Each episode will welcome a special guest expert. Among them are Matt Carey-Williams, who has worked for all three major auction houses; Margo McDaid, an artist who runs a gallery in Margate; and Ani Petrov, VP Marketing and Data Analytics at digital marketplace Artsy.
The teams include Darren and Charles, a pair of London friends with a “go getter” attitude; Ollie and Bella, siblings who hope their “strong family connection” will help them grab the brass ring; Gavin and Liam from Belfast, who are into graffiti; and Phil and Ellie, a father and daughter who “are hopeful a mixture of youth and experience will be a winning formula.”
Episode 1 premieres on BBC Northern Ireland on August 12 and BBC Two and iPlayer on August 13.
