"Everything that was once cutting-edge becomes reality-TV fodder."

Andres "Piss Christ" Serrano as a guest judge on "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist":

The contestants had less than a day to create their "shocking" works of art....

Miles, who has won two previous rounds, created a large illustration of Mickey Mouse involving penis-like embellishments. Last week's winner, John, attempted a painting of a man performing fellatio on himself, while Jaclyn created a series of low-res nude photos of herself. Ryan made a portrait of himself as a transsexual prostitute. Both Erik and Mark created works addressing child sexual abuse.

Works addressing child sexual abuse, eh? And when you do that, you're not making child pornography, right? Can't have been or it wouldn't have been on TV. You have to shock without really doing anything wrong.

Taking a different approach, Abdi chose to create a series of molds depicting young black youths as bombs ready to go off.

Sounds racist — but racism is still shocking, right? — and like a rip off of the infamous Muhammad-with-a-bomb-turban cartoon. Abdi is a Muslim name, by the way. But a little research shows that Abdi is black, so presumably that was TV-okay.

Because of the nature of the challenge, the episode featured a lot of bleeped words and blurred images.

All the better for DVD sales.

They criticized John's work for its cartoon-like execution and for the fact that he misspelled "fellatio" as "follatio."

Ha ha. Spelling error! Ding!