SFX: Television tunes in to a channel. Ambient sounds from recording session throughout – muffled, not audible or of substance, laughter, table noise, etc. plays underneath the stop – intention is to make it feel as if this is unfolding in real time.

NARRATOR:

Sometimes, someone shows you something that makes you say – Ahh!! For a group of us recently, that someone was curator Caitlin Haskell.

SFX: (audible, but still in the background, under the narration) It’s one of my favorites.

NARRATOR: We were having a conversation about this very painting —

CAITLIN HASKELL:

Colored TV.

NARRATOR:

And this is what happened–

HASKELL:

In some ways it seems like it’s a…just a one-liner. Right? Colored TV, you’ve got a colored TV set picture there. Maybe a second reading would be: Who’s on the television but sort of a-a starlet with blond hair.

[Unidentified voice in the room] A busty blond.

HASKELL:

It draws attention to the racial difference between the-the person who’s on the television and the person watching the television.

And then there’s a third reading of it, which we get through this worker’s boot there. Colored Transvestite. So that is a man dressed like a woman (CROWD AMBI: Mmmm. Mmmm.) sort of looking at this blonde (CROWD AMBI: AAAAAAAAhhhhh)

And as it says there on the bottom “Wishing on a Prime Time Star.” So that’s — you have a really nuanced cultural critique going on here you’ve got the middle class attributes of the fireplace and you’ve got a black stallion on the mantle too (group laughs) – and the lily pad carpet he signs C. Monet (more laughs) and just the color that he’s using, it’s such a great, great painting, I mean it looks like it was painted yesterday.