What’s Happening: Despite the network’s proven history of engaging with contemporary art—see Andy Warhol’s mid-’80s “Fifteen Minutes” talk show, the early animation showcase “Liquid Television,” and masterpiece “RuPaul’s Drag Race”—MTV stumbles while trying to find its Next Great Artist.

The Download: On the first episode of “The Exhibit,” the MTV reality competition show set adjacent to the art world, lead judge Melissa Chiu boasts about the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the DC institution she directs and which will host the titular prize. “Some people think of us as the wild child of the Smithsonian,” she says. Then smirks. “A bit wild.” But whatever wildness it might have didn’t make it onto the canvas of “The Exhibit,” in which seven artists compete by making zeitgeisty work for a chance to win $100,000, a solo show at the Hirshhorn, and the title of “the next great artist.”

The show had talent. Take Frank Buffalo Hyde, an accomplished painter leading the way in an “Indigenous renaissance”; zany maker Misha Kahn, a wizard with VR and inflatables; and show winner Baseera Khan, already a bona fide star. They and four other contestants readily faced each week’s challenge (or “commission”) with concepts and supplies. They made friends and fought a little, but offered little evidence of coming out of the experience changed.

As a host, Chiu was prim but up for a few scrapes: take a remarkably unembarrassing debate with painter and NFT-booster Kenny Schachter over the role of beauty in the success of an artwork (She felt it didn’t have one, mostly.) These brief minutes were both the highlight of the series and an illustration of why “The Exhibit” failed.

Reality television has proven adept at staging craft competitions and has platformed the queer theater and performance art traditions of drag with such revolutionary vibrancy that Republicans are literally trying to make them felonies. It has also established new critical frameworks. On the drag competition show “Dragula,” which consistently platforms more adventurous artmaking than “The Exhibit” ever managed to, hosts Dracmorda Boulet and Swanthula Boulet begin each judge’s panel with a manifesto: “We are not here to judge your drag,” they say. “Drag is art and art is subjective. What we are judging you on is your drag as it relates to this competition.” On “Drag Race,” the best drag is also entirely subjective—basically, it’s whatever pleases RuPaul at any given moment.

“The Exhibit” established no such internal framework for success. Chiu gives lip service to the criteria of “originality, quality of execution, and concept of work,” but does not explain how the artists she namechecks, including multiple mentions of Ai Weiwei, meet them. Hirshhorn trustee and guest judge Keith Rivers repeatedly states that art is something that changes your life, but nobody ever explains just how, or establishes why it must. Digital strategist and guest judge JiaJia Fei twice insisted that she most likes art that most “looked like art.” Chiu says art “makes us think and feel.” The banality is enraging at a time when art forms including literature and drag are under attack and public funding for art has evaporated.

To make “The Exhibit” work, MTV should have courage in its convictions and be able to share them. If the art world can’t quickly and clearly communicate why some art works and some doesn’t—if it can’t argue that contemporary art, despite decades of mainstream media deriding it as elitist or worse, is valuable and that its values can be shared—those who think art is only a force for evil will succeed in canceling more than “The Exhibit” itself.

In Their Own Words: “Like with any skill-based competition series, whether it be designing dresses or baking cakes or creating works of art, the challenge for producers remains the same,” Nadim Amiry, MTV Entertainment Studios’ VP of original series, wrote in an email to the New York Times. “It’s in providing the audience with enough information and knowledge to be able to play along and feel that they too can evaluate the work on the show.”

Surface Says: If “The Exhibit” wants to turn its audience into a nation of art critics, it had better define its terms.

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This year during NYCxDesign, Surface is partnering with furniture designer Kouros Maghsoudi to host a one-night showcase and blowout cocktail party. Interested in learning more about partnership opportunities and event integrations as we shake up design week and celebrate New York’s unrivaled creative spirit? Let’s chat.

For one week in April, all eyes are on Milan as the city undergoes an overnight transformation into the world’s undisputed design capital. Salone del Mobile attendees have much to see across the fair’s endless expanse of halls, but Fuorisalone is replete with hidden treasures. Here are the installations, exhibitions, and pop-ups around town you shouldn’t miss.

Six hundred years ago, the port village of Durgerdam was erected on the banks of the Zuiderzee lake just a few miles from Amsterdam. Today, Durgerdam retains its traditional wood-clad houses, the result of their protection as a heritage site. One, in particular, holds a special history: Built in 1644, its white-painted timber exterior reflected the moonlight so well it acted as an ersatz lighthouse leading fishermen home to the village.

Today, the building is a siren song for design aficionados in its new incarnation as De Durgerdam, a new Aedes hotel featuring 11 rooms and three distinctive suites. For its first hotel interior, local studio Buro Belén crafted bespoke furniture pieces, including headboards of Dutch tulip, complemented by custom tiles by Royal Tichelaar Makkum, the Netherlands’ oldest ceramics company.

Suites feature wood-burning stoves and even a sky-blue raincoat by KASSL Edition, perfect for a misty morning walk through the abundant neighboring meadows before dinner at the De Mark restaurant on the property’s ground floor. There, chefs Richard van Oostenbrugge and Thomas Groot—of Amsterdam’s two-Michelin-star Restaurant 212—offer seasonal menus based on local harvests, including the treasures of the sea that fishermen have mined for centuries.

Milan’s 5Vie district is among the city’s most design-conscious, perhaps never more so than this time of year, when tens of thousands visit the city for Milan Design Week. An essential stop on their itineraries will be L’Appartamento, an apartment in a historic 1930s building with interiors reimagined by six preeminent designers—each utilizing furnishings and art selected from the Artemest network of brands and makers.

Just past a set of yellow-and-blue colored glass windows, T.ZED offers a textured entryway, while Paris’ Anne-Sophie Pailleret groups visionary furnishings and sculptural lighting, announcing to visitors that L’Appartamento is firmly facing the future. Kingston Lafferty Design then takes them on a journey into the Living Room, while MONIOMI Design brings a touch of Miami heat to the terrace. In the dining room, Nina Magon plumbs the contours of monochromatic design, while Styled Habitat’s Rabah Saeid returns to the apartment’s 1930s roots with an Italianate bedroom that steers clear of period pieces.

From latex-clad benches and glowing light fixtures that resemble radiators, Kate Greenberg’s industrial-leaning objects are meant to feel slightly off. The emerging Bay Area designer deftly translates stark materials into something subtle and atmospheric, challenging how we approach furniture by making them a foggy reflection of reality. The breadth of her talents will be on display at Alcova during Milan Design Week, where her home apparatuses transform a dark basement into an uncanny, near-future reflection of domestic living in tune with Earth’s diurnal rhythms.

This past weekend, bicoastal A-listers descended upon the Geffen Contemporary, MOCA’s outpost in Little Tokyo, for the museum’s annual gala. The evening toasted exhibiting artists Carl Craig and Henry Taylor while treating 1,100 guests to a preview of “Carl Craig: Party/After-Party.” The evening was also a sendoff of sorts as “Henry Taylor: B Side” heads to the Whitney following a critically acclaimed debut at MOCA. The night ended with a live jazz performance by Grammy-winning musician Samara Joy.

When was it? April 15.

Where was it? The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles.

Who was there? Carolyn Clark Powers, Keanu Reeves, Betye Saar, Eric Andre, Catherine Opie, Nazy Nazhand, Jason Wu, and more.

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Achille Salvagni leads his eponymous, multidisciplinary, and award-winning architecture and design firm with offices in Rome, London and New York. In 2013, Salvagni founded Achille Salvagni Atelier, a studio devoted to the production of his limited-edition furniture and lighting.

Surface Says: One of the most versatile designers working today, Salvagni wields a passion for quality and craftsmanship that takes the lead in every project, from sumptuous apartments in Rome and an eponymous line of clean-lined furniture to his award-winning yacht interiors.

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