OK, I’ll admit it – I’m a sucker for Barry Chappell’s Fine Art Showcase on Thursday and Saturday nights on the Celebrity Shopping Network. Who is he, you ask? This, from his website:

For the last 15 years, Barry Chappell has helped thousands of people buy museum quality art at the lowest possible prices. His unmatched expertise combined with his passion for value has solidified his reputation as art’s foremost deal-maker.

Today, Barry is privileged to host Barry Chappell’s Fine Art Showcase on the Celebrity Shopping Network. Within just a few short months, the show has exploded in popularity and Barry’s name has become synonymous with quality and value. Not only does the program combine the lowest prices with the best deals, but it also highlights Barry’s innate ability to tell ‘the stories behind the masterpieces’.

For us, it’s an especially guilty pleasure, because, if you had the dough and an empty-enough credit card, you could go absolutely nuts and very much into debt if restraint was your problem. The show is pretty much an auction of fine art and objects d’art, and that in and of itself would be entertaining enough for me to watch. After all, whenever we’ve vacationed on cruises, I’ve always enjoyed the art auctions invariably held by on the cruise ships as a way to vary the on-ship entertainment and make someone some money. I’ve never bought any work of art that way (and probably never would, as my own particular taste in art doen’t extend much beyond the seascapes you see sold in the little art galleries in Newport, RI, or Ogunquit, ME), but they’ve always been an interesting way to pass the time.

What makes Chappell’s show so entertaining, however, is the lack of slickness involved in the proceedings, even though it’s obvious the guy knows how to present and sell stuff. His set is simple – a table, a couple of lounge chairs, and an obviously-phony backdrop of a city with rush-hour traffic. But it’s his laid-back, unassuming style that I enjoy the most. While attempting to auction off some works by an artist he’s gone heads over heels for, convinced they’re investment-quality works that will stand the test of time, or holding up printouts of Internet web sites showing how much art galleries and museums have paid for a particular artist’s works or the number of books published featuring the artist’s works, Chappell drinks his diet soda, kibbitzes with his staff off camera, sits in a chair and converses about nothing in general, or just tosses out figures to start the bidding process. It’s fun, laid back, and a nice cable alternative to the nonsenical talking head and reality television shows polluting the airwaves.