The season finale of Gallery Girls picks up two weeks after Art Basel, and none of the drama from Miami has been put to rest. While one would expect a season finale to give some closure to the show’s plots, the girls manage to lose their way and alienate themselves even further during their eighth televised hour.
Kerri has been juggling her internship at Sharon Hurowitz’s art advisory and her well-paid job as a lifestyle manager for a while now. After voicing her concerns to boss Tony Abrams last episode, she spends the finale voicing the same concern to other authority figures in her life. There is no resolution or new information presented regarding her problem in the episode, and the plot remains a cliffhanger for a second time— at least, in the world of Gallery Girls. In the real world, there’s a scene where Kerri clearly makes a decision—she goes with the job that pays her piles of money—but the producers turn the mics down and the singer-songwriters up, saving that exhilarating half-narrative for another day. It seems that in trying to give the audience reasons to watch a second season of Gallery Girls, the producers forgot to give us a reason to watch the first.
At this point, Liz is on speaking terms with pretty much no one, so we don’t see much of her during the finale. At an Eli Klein event, we see her talking trash about the other girls to her boyfriend Bobby, the only one left to listen. During the end credits we see Liz bemoaning her relationship with her father while opening a pair of golden Louboutins, a Sex and the City-style suggestion that rich girls have problems, too.
Chantal waltzes into End of Century for the first time since before Art Basel, flaunting a new fur. Claudia, who is still thousands of dollars in debt and unable to pay the utilities on the gallery space, is not amused. Shown a final termination notice from ConEd, Chantal guffaws. Co-owner Lara comes up with an idea to save the gallery: “Sell a painting!”
“People don’t buy art the way they buy clothes, that’s just the way it is.” --Claudia
Claudia regrets her choice of business partners, and meets Angela to vent her frustrations over a drink. Claudia is suspicious of Chantal’s trip to Paris immediately after Art Basel. According to Chantal, she came down with a lung infection and had to stay in the hospital. Angela seems more eager to talk about her new purse, a Givenchy she’s been saving up for. “I’m a real adult now,” explains Angela: “I have an adult handbag.”
Angela takes more photographs of her friends standing in front of Chinatown storefronts, and they are really no different from the ones that didn’t sell in her first two shows. She heads to an event at the Fowler Arts Collective and finds Chantal chugging champagne from the bottle to nurse her lung infection. Angela, in her duty as a terrible friend, tells Chantal hyperbolically about Claudia’s dissatisfaction with End of Century and with Chantal’s behavior.
The fate of End of Century is left hanging. The gallery still exists in real life, so there are only so many ways this can go, but we’re left wondering how such an incompetent group of people could possibly run a delicate business like a gallery. Claudia makes no effort to reach outside her close social circle to find artists and buyers or to market the gallery, while Chantal and Lara feign exhaustion and scream at Claudia whenever she brings up the finances.
The only happy ending on Gallery Girls is Amy’s and it’s completely fabricated by Bravo. In an incredible coincidence, she and Maggie have unknowingly applied to work at the same gallery, Bernarducci Meisel. After bombing the interview in a previous episode, Maggie is sure that the job is hers. The two are each called in for a paid trial day. Maggie drags her feet and fails basic tasks like looking through drawers and knowing the names of the gallery’s shows, while Amy is perky and espresso-competent.
Maggie is only more certain after her flawed performance that the job is hers, and spares no time in leaving Eli Klein’s gallery ungracefully, putting the cart well before the horse. Eli remarks that he doesn’t want people working for him for free; it’s entirely lost on Maggie that perhaps she could have negotiated a paid position had she communicated with him properly. She’s called in for the rare and brutal in-person rejection when Amy gets the position. While there are many lessons Maggie could have learned from the experience, she fixates on one of Frank Bernarducci’s comments about her not having a passion for art. Her short-sightedness is hardly surprising: earlier this episode she wondered how shells get onto beaches.
Amy becomes the first Gallery Girl to actually be paid to work in a gallery. Of course, anyone who’s looked for work before knows that her plot is a complete fairytale. There’s simply no way that Maggie and Amy were the two most qualified of any group of candidates, and contrary to Amy’s experience, most interviewers don’t gossip about the quality of other applicants. In real life, the topic of their incompetence under Sharon/Eli would have come up. Not to mention, Amy’s father gave her two weeks to find a new apartment and job. After spending extra time in Miami to see relatives, how much time could she have had? And when did she look for apartments?
We have to give it to Gallery Girls; their cringeworthy deus ex machinas and tenuous grasp of personal finances give the show that ‘Sex and the City’ feel, after all.
Next season, the Gallery Girls visit the inside of a "You" tube.
- Gallery Girls Episode 7: “It Feels So Good to Be a Gangster”
- Gallery Girls Episode 6: We’ve All Made Mistakes
- Gallery Girls Episode 5: I Didn’t See a Vagina in It, But Spencer’s Boss Did
- Gallery Girls Episode 4: “Gays and Asians, We Can’t Handle Either of You Anymore”
- Gallery Girls Episode 3: “It’s Like, Actual Dirt”
- Gallery Girls Episode 2: “I Feel Like We’re Being Raped Right Now”
- Gallery Girls Episode 1: I’m Just Going to Let Her Rot
{ 3 comments }
omg, wannabe pseudo gallerinas that are really OC housewives in disguise? how is it that i’m missing this piece of quality programming?
This sentence in paragraph three: “Brooklynite Angela claims Carrie Bradshaw as her inspiration, despite her hostility toward the cast members who at all resemble Bradshaw and toward the Upper East Side in general.”
It makes me feel dyslexic.
Really really need my neighbor to get her cable turned back on so I can start watching this.
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