Portrait of the Best Artist

1982, 5:38 min, color, sound

Davidovich produced The Live! Show on Manhattan Cable Television's leased access Channel J from 1979 to 1984. The program featured performances by and interviews with art world personalities, live phone-ins and a home-shopping segment. Davidovich hosted the show in the guise of his character "Dr. Videovich."

In this episode of The Live! Show, produced in April 1982, Dr. Videovich interviews the "Best Artist," whose large-scale painting on a wall in New York's SoHo neighborhood proclaims, "I am the Best Artist." The deadpan interview between Davidovich's alter ego and the self-declared Best Artist (Rene, who compares himself to Leonardo DaVinci) touches on the nature of art making, advice to young artists, and promoting art. Standing with the Best Artist in front of the mural on West Broadway at Broome Street or walking to the Best Artist Gallery at 147 Wooster Street, Davidovich also captures a snapshot of SoHo when it was the center of the New York art world, and could still be referred to, in Dr. Videovich's words, as an "artists' colony."