Art Crawl

"Art Crawl" is the eighth episode of the first season of the animated television series Bob's Burgers. The episode originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on March 20, 2011.

The episode was written by Lizzie and Wendy Molyneux, and was directed by Kyounghee Lim. According to the Nielsen ratings, it was viewed by 4.43 million viewers during its original airing. The episode featured guest performances by Andy Kindler, Jerry Minor, Megan Mullally, Larry Murphy, Sam Seder, Laura Silverman and Sarah Silverman.

Plot

To avoid Linda's fragile sister Gayle (Megan Mullally), who is hanging her paintings at the restaurant, Bob and his children tour the town's annual art crawl where they criticize paintings. Louise is surprised when someone buys a painting from the art supply store managers, whom she hates, and ends up getting exiled by the elderly couple, Edith and Harold (Larry Murphy and Sam Seder). Bob and the kids return home from the art crawl and discover Gayle's paintings of animal anuses on display in the restaurant.

Bob worries that Gayle's painting will cause the restaurant to lose business, but Linda wants to encourage Gayle's artistic nature. Thus, she insists that the paintings will be taken down at the end of the art crawl, which is only a few days away. Realizing how bad the art crawl paintings are, Louise opens an art sale outside of the restaurant and forces her siblings to paint "crap artwork" as an easy way to earn money. Twenty-seven minutes later, Gene completes his laborious painting of a robot ninja fighting a tape recorder vampire at Stonehenge with his 28-year-old albino friend. Tina paints a portrait of her dentist naked. Louise disagrees with their paintings—although she later agrees to let them paint, as long as they do it in a realistic way. Bob catches on to the scheme, and replaces Gayle's paintings with his kids', knowing Linda will love the replacements, but Gayle sees through it. Bob almost levels with Gayle to tell her why he replaced her paintings until Edith and Harold arrive at the restaurant in an effort to forbid displaying the anus paintings, both deeming them offensive. Preferring to side with Gayle over the couple, Bob scares them off with the anus paintings. Bob declares the restaurant an "anus restaurant" by hanging the paintings on the establishment's walls and encourages Gayle to paint more anus portraits. Meanwhile, Louise's art sale is failing, so she replaces Tina and Gene with classmates Red and twins Andy and Ollie Pesto (Laura and Sarah Silverman). Edith and Harold continue to protest against the anus paintings and Bob declares that the paintings will be a permanent installation.

The next morning, Bob discovers the anuses have been covered over with painted pink underpants and accuses Edith of vandalism. Despite Louise's surprising art sale success, she becomes very bossy and acts like a pimp to the boys. However, she sees Bob entering the art crawl commission, so she follows him and witnesses Gene and Tina learning how to paint. Bob demands an apology, but Edith and Harold make it clear that they did not do anything to Gayle's paintings. In retaliation, Bob paints anuses on Edith and Harold's paintings, both of which are works composed entirely of black dots. Bob later gets arrested by Officers Julia and Cliffany for defacing Edith's property and it is revealed that Linda censored the anuses, not Edith. Linda explains that she had frequent hallucinations of animal anuses that made her paint an image of her pink underpants over the canvases. Louise pays for the damaged paintings with the money that she earned from selling paintings at the art crawl.

Reception

In its original American broadcasting, "Art Crawl" was viewed by an estimated 4.43 million viewers and received a 2.2 rating, a 6 percent share among adults between the ages of 18 and 49, an increase from last episode.^[1]

Rowan Kaiser of The A.V. Club gave the episode an A, saying "It's a great feeling to be there when a show filled with potential suddenly fulfills it. First off, because you can get the feeling that you're special for being one of the few million who was actually there, live, when Bob's Burgers went from good to great. Second of all, because you can't stop laughing at how ridiculously good “Art Crawl” is. Bob's Burgers has been developing several different threads, and they all work really well here: the ineffectual liberal antagonists, Bob's stubbornness when things don't work the way he thinks they should, Gene and Tina's absurd asides, Louise's megalomania, and Linda's intense willingness to make sure everything goes smoothly."^[2]

References