The Bold and the Beautiful

The exhibition The Bold and the Beautiful presents the works of eight artists, all recent years’ bachelor degree graduates of Israel’s various art academies. They created the works especially for the exhibition, referencing and responding to the concepts of ‘artificial’, ‘plastic’ and ‘manipulation’.

The Bold and the Beautiful (often referred to as B&B) is an American soap opera that premiered in 1987 and runs to this day. It takes place mainly in Los Angeles and centers on the Forrester family, which owns the prestigious fashion brand “Forrester Creations”. B&B aired in Israel from the mid-1990s. Long before the waves of docu-reality washed over television screens, bringing a close encounter with rich and extroverted characters, B&B exposed the Israeli audience to excessive wealth and feigned luxury. The Bold and the Beautiful exhibition combines the fantasies and delusions of the participating artists in parallel lines of similarity, which generate a synthesized experience for scripted scenes. B&B’s melodramatic plot twists often revolve around absurd romance, intrigue, and collusion. Some of the exhibition’s works offer a critical and ridiculing look at the show’s exaggerated nature, while others deal with issues derived from it more generally, such the division to ‘good’ and ‘evil’, fetishism, materialism, and admiration of status symbols.

Nearly 9,000 episodes have thus far been filmed for the series. Unlike other soap operas, B&B episodes are only 20 minutes long. In addition, scenes from the previous episodes are not shown at the beginning of each episode, making it more difficult to keep track of the plot. The exhibition’s works seem to have been uprooted from the artists’ studios, where they work in a vacuum, far from examining eyes and guiding hands. Placing these works in space creates a kind of individual ‘chapters,’ cosmically interconnected materialistically and philosophically, but not programmatically.

The exhibition examines the feasibility of the appearance of unnatural phenomena in natural materials and draws inspiration from the soap opera’s artificial reality. Over the years, significant criticism of B&B has targeted the fast-paced plot changes, especially with regard to relationships between the characters. Some reviews have praised the series for quickly terminating problematic plot lines (for example, the almost romantic relationship between Ridge and Bridget that was not well received by the audience as the two were perceived as relatives, despite the fact they are not blood relations). In contrast, other critics have lamented that some stories fade away without a definite conclusion. Just like the show, whose plot splits into different storylines, each spread over multiple episodes, so too the exhibition does not present a unified, continuous narrative – but rather, acts as an enigmatic organism without a solution.