According to NBC Universal’s Bravo fact sheet, "Bravo is the cable network that plugs people into arts, culture and pop culture with original programming, movies and by showing a whole different side of celebrities." They cultivate an arts and pop culture focused image including original niche reality programs. Their new positioning statement, "Watch what happens," is a reference to the network's current focus on original reality programming.

Really?

Bravo certainly isn't the lowest, most belly-to-the-floor of cable networks, but that's not for lack of trying. After all, some swim deeper (Fox News), some pander in a more base modality (G4), and some hide under rocks (CNN), only reaching out an arm to make obscene gestures. But this isn't to condemn any of these stations; I certainly watch my fair share of Bravo.

Still, do I enjoy it because it offers me the chance to "plug” into art? Just don’t give me that shit. Rather than ask me what connects this to art, how they project art into televised space, or how I can infinitely justify how this is art, I have a better question: who cares about art? Or culture? Or this bizarre distinction that Bravo thinks it’s making between “culture and pop culture”? Is anything depicted through the lens of television anything but an artifact, or the very stuff of popular culture itself?

I suppose their shows, sometimes, attempt to broaden the base of their entertainment: Flipping Out and Million Dollar Listing gives a modest sense of the housing and real estate industries in Los Angeles; Real Housewives of Orange County and Date My Ex are wonderfully contrived pieces of (pop) sociology, or at least some kind of fucked up human psycho-zoology; and maybe Top Chef says something about how we like what we like (at least with Project Runway I can play along — who can taste what they’re cooking?). All of which is culture. I suppose.

But, regardless, all of that culture and art crap is an old-man’s terminology. If you “care” (in all of the word’s variations) about things like Bravo, you probably don’t “care” (again: in ALL of the word’s varied shades of meaning - is “care” a piece of outdated terminology too?) about culture. Maybe you even hate it. Personality is the key here. And reality television defines the new power of the cult of personality, the hyper-image of the New Rugged Individualism, the meta-man who’s constantly meta-aware of how the public is meta-aware of him . . . I could go on and on, conjuring up new, over-hyped and outdated mixtures of pseudo-post-modern (wow, new meme) jargon, but instead I’ll — “Watch what happens.”

Story by Greg Sidman.