What happens when you combine a love of reality TV with academic expertise in art history and critical media studies? For Dr. Wendy Peters, Associate Professor of Gender Equality and Social Justice in the Faculty of Arts and Science at Nipissing University, it led to a fascinating new research publication.
Peters, along with co-author Dr. Robin Alex McDonald from MacEwan University, just published "If the art ends up being pretty, making it here won't be: Examining Precarity, Neoliberalism, and Artists' Labour on CBC's Crash Gallery" in the Canadian Journal of Communication. The article takes a critical look at how the 2015 CBC reality competition series portrayed artists and their working conditions.
"We're both fans of reality TV, and we watched Crash Gallery together," explains Peters. "But as we watched, we started noticing how the show presented artistic work in ways that reflected broader patterns in how we think about artists' labour in Canada."
The research reveals how Crash Gallery normalized challenging working conditions for artists including temporary work, intense competition, and even hazardous work environments by framing these as exciting opportunities rather than concerning trends. The show's format, Peters and McDonald argue, reflects neoliberal approaches to arts funding and reality TV programming that emphasize individual competition over collective support.
"The show presented artists as naturally flexible and passionate workers who should be willing to work under any conditions," Peters notes. "This kind of representation has real implications for how we understand, compensate, and value artistic labour in Canada."
Peters and McDonald have another collaboration forthcoming in the journal Screen Bodies and Peters will also be teaching a course titled "Reality TV and the Politics of Difference" at Nipissing University during the 2026 Winter term.
