What if an artist-focused TV series filmed an episode in your hometown? Which artist would you want to meet? Who would you recommend?

Now, art lovers will have the chance to nominate an artist or city of their choice for Arthouse, a groundbreaking TV series that promises to bridge the gap between authentic artists and the communities that often overlook their talent. Produced by Crewest Studios and supported by NOT REAL ART fiscal sponsor Arterial, Arthouse aims to peel back the layers of the art world, sharing the personal stories of regional artists and their collectors.

With a mission to democratize art, Arthouse empowers viewers to curate authentic artwork that aligns with their tastes without straining their budgets. The show's concept centers on eliminating intimidation in art collecting, providing local artists with a platform to showcase their work directly to buyers.

To support this vision, Arthouse has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise $150,000 to produce a full-length pilot episode. Set in Chicago, the pilot will follow an individual or family as they explore local art scenes, visit artist studios, and make informed purchasing decisions with the help of host Carmen Acosta. The campaign, running from June 10 to July 25, 2025, on Indiegogo, offers a unique opportunity for art lovers to contribute to a project that aims to transform the way we perceive and appreciate art in our daily lives. With a $40 donation, anyone can nominate an artist or city of their choice to appear on Arthouse. 

Listen to today’s episode to learn more about the project, or nominate an artist for Arthouse here.

The Not Real Art podcast is intended for creative audiences only.

The Not Real Art Podcast celebrates creativity and creative culture worldwide.

It contains material that is fresh, fun and inspiring and is not suitable for boring old art snobs.

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Greetings and salutations, my creative brothers and sisters.

Welcome to Not Real Art, the podcast where we talk to the world's most creative people.

I am your host.

Faithful, trusty, loyal, tireless, relentless host.

Sourdough, coming at you from Crew West Studio in Los Angeles.

How are you people?

Thanks for showing up.

We do this for you and we really appreciate your loyalty.

It's the last week of the month, which means I have an auditorial for you.

As you know, the last week of every month I drop an auditorial where I get on my soapbox and I talk about something that's near and dear to my heart.

And this week, I want to tell you about Art House, the truth about Art House project that I've been working on for a few years and I can't wait to share more with you about it.

It's a television show about real people meeting real artists to buy real art without breaking the bank.

And I want to tell you all about it today.

But before I do, I want to thank our sponsor, Arturial, our fiscal sponsor, Arturial.

Without them, we couldn't do this.

Our fiscal sponsorship with Arturo allows you to contribute and donate and support the show and.

And get a tax break for doing so.

A tax deduction.

So thanks to Arturial for being our fiscal sponsor.

Of course, I want to encourage you, as I always do, to check out all the good, healthy, nutritious, wholesome stuff we got for you@notrealart.com Amazing stories and content about art and artists.

You're going to discover some incredible work there, whether it's through our first Friday's exhibitions that drop the first Fridays of every month or.

Or whether it's our remote series.

Exclusive series, remote with Badir McCleary where he's exploring public art.

We've got new episodes.

Season two is dropping soon, so be sure to check it out.

Lots of great stuff@notrealart.com please check it out.

Okay, people, today.

Today is our auditorial.

Yes, auditorium.

Get my soapbox out.

I'm going to tell you about Art House.

I'm going to.

Matter of fact, I'm going to divulge the truth about Art House.

And Art House is a TV show that I've been working on actually since the pandemic.

I Got the ide during the pandemic.

And it's something I've been working on for a while, and I want to tell you all about it.

And I think Netflix helped us all survive that a little bit.

And I think it was.

Forget what month it was, but some, sometime along the way, Netflix dropped Chef's Table.

And Chef's Table was this beautiful, beautiful sort of deep dive into a chef's life.

And they would pick a chef and we'd meet the chef and learn about, you know, their philosophy in terms of, you know, serving people, making food, prep, preparing food, growing food.

It was a rich, beautiful, lovely, gorgeous deep dive into what it's like to be a chef.

And if you haven't seen it, by all means, go watch it.

It's gorgeous.

But when I saw it, I thought, man, you know, we need to do this for artists.

Like, wouldn't it be cool to.

To do, like, you know, I don't know.

They did Chef's Table.

Let's do artist easel, something artist studio.

And we go into the studio and we learn about the artists and their art making.

And so I started doing some research and understood pretty quickly that Chef's Table is incredibly expensive to make for Netflix.

And in fact, it won a ton of awards.

But it didn't make a lot of money.

And it didn't make a lot of money because, quite frankly, it cost so much to make.

It was so beautiful.

You could see it on the screen.

They clearly put a ton of money in the production value of the show.

And so I thought, okay, well, maybe we're not going to, you know, have millions and millions of dollars to make the show like Chef's Table.

But then, of course, you know, I turn on hgtv, I see shows like House Hunters, and I'm like, huh, what if you took the DNA of a show like Chef's Table and you took the DNA of a show like House Hunters and you put it together, what would you get if you really wanted to do something for visual art?

And I came up with the idea for Art House.

And it was essentially this idea where we have, all of us have artists living in our community, and many of us don't know those artists.

Many of us maybe don't know that you can go tour those artists studios and meet those artists and buy art directly from the artist.

And I thought, wouldn't it be Interesting to make a show where we're helping people.

Just like in House Hunters, people are trying to find the perfect home.

What if we could take people around to find the perfect piece of art, right?

Something they could afford, something without breaking the bank.

Because, of course, you and I both know that there's lots of great art out there that we can afford.

Doesn't have you spend millions of dollars.

You can actually spend hundreds of dollars or, you know, maybe a couple thousand dollars and find amazing art that you love, right, from artists that you love.

And so I started just thinking about this and thinking about this, and I came up with this idea and I said, you know what?

Art house is about real people meeting real artists to buy real art without breaking the bank.

And rather than going to the big cities, New York, Chicago, Louisiana.

Miami, we're gonna go to Wichita, Kansas, we're gonna go to Madison, Wisconsin, we're gonna go to Albuquerque, New Mexico, we're gonna go to these, you know, smaller communities, and we're gonna shine a light on the artists there.

You know, so many artists in these communities never get any love, right?

And so we thought, well, how do we.

How do we show love to these artists?

And we'll go and we'll meet the family, we'll meet the potential buyer, we'll get a sense of their taste and how they're living their budget and their favorite colors, their colors they hate, and.

And take them to meet artists that we think that they're going to enjoy meeting.

And so this idea that, you know, our expert, affable host will meet the family, meet the buyer, meet the person, take them to meet three working artists in three working studios.

And we go in and.

And we get to know that artist, and we get to know how they.

How they're about their practice and their.

Their process and their art making and their philosophy, and we get to learn about their work.

And then we meet three different artists, all of whom that we think will.

That the.

The buyer, new newbie buyer, might.

Might love or might like.

And then, of course, there's going to be some drama, some tension.

You know, the wife loves this artist.

The husband hates that artist.

He loves this artist.

She hates that artist.

I mean, back and forth, right?

And so there's some hand wringing.

Who are they going to go with?

And then in the end of the second act, they choose the artist that they want to go with.

And so then that artist gets chosen and then that artist for a little more suspension and drama, that artist then has to pick a piece of work of their work and place it into the home.

And of course, the couple, the family, they don't know what the piece is going to be, how they're going to love it, are they going to hate it?

Who knows?

We don't know.

The audience doesn't know.

But we're going to stay tuned, we're going to sit on the edge of our seat because we really want to see what artwork gets placed and how it looks on the wall in the home and how the couple reacts or how the family reacts.

Right?

So that's essentially the idea of Art House, right?

That's the core idea.

And I thought, okay, well, if I want to make the show, I mean, I'm an idea guy, I'm a creative, but I haven't produced television before, really, so, you know, I better find the right team, right?

And so I started making calls.

I started, you know, networking and started talking to people that I know that work in the business.

And, man, I met this incredible woman called Laura Patterson, and she was a director of House hunters for like 20 seasons.

Like, it's been with the show for a long, long time.

And then I met.

I met Laura, and then I met her colleague Dana Cook, who is a casting person for House Hunters.

And then I met their dp, Brian.

And then I met.

Then I met Stacy Schneider.

Stacy's a showrunner show.

You know, she's been running and making these shows, not just House Hunters, but Designers Challenge and.

And other TV shows.

And.

And so I, all of a sudden, I had this incredible team that we could make the show, the art house show.

We can make it.

We had the.

The actual team that makes House Hunters and we can make Arthouse.

And we, you know, I've just been so excited about this because it's been something I've been working on for a few years.

Finally got the team together, working.

We did a little proof of concept video last year, and the links in the show notes, you should check it out.

And we're just, we're loving it.

But of course, you know, as you'll see in our little proof of concept video, we didn't have a host.

I stood in as the host.

You know, me, I have a little bit of.

A, little bit of a, you know, I don't know, personality maybe.

I thought, well, let me.

Let me stand in for the host because we.

We don't have a host.

So I did, and it was fun and fine, but I always believed that, of course there was a far better person out there to be the host of the show.

And I actually also thought the ideal host would be a woman.

And so, you know, we talked to three different artists who I thought could be good hosts.

Two female artists, one male artist.

The male artist was from the east coast, and the two female artists were here in la.

And long story short, they all did great in their screen test, but one of the three really stood out, and she was Carmen Acosta.

Carmen's been on the podcast a couple times, as you might know, but now Carmen, Carmen is the host of Art House.

And we're just thrilled, thrilled to have Carmen.

She's going to be perfect for this.

And we are ready to go.

We are ready to go.

And we want to get into production.

We've been developing pre.

Pre production right now, developing the pilot episode.

We want to go back to Chicago where we did the Proof of Concept, and we want to shoot the pilot there in August.

Now, why does all this matter?

Why.

Why am I telling you all this?

Right?

Why do I want everybody to know?

Because you know what?

It matters because these artists that get overlooked are now going to get opportunity to shine, because these artists that we get to cast on the show are going to get more eyes on their work than they ever would have otherwise.

They're going to have national and maybe even international exposure.

Right?

Potentially millions of people are going to learn about that artist artwork, and that's never been done before like that.

And, you know, somebody asked me, said, well, aren't the artists going to be sad if they don't get chosen?

I'm like, no, because all the artists win for being on the show.

They're going to get all these.

All this, you know, new kind of, you know, new people, you know, looking at their work and discovering their work.

And I know artists, artists are happy when people discover art and artists that they love, those artists that aren't chosen are going to be happy for the artist that was chosen.

And even more than that, they're going to be happy for the family or the person that found art and artists that they.

They love.

And so everybody wins.

Everybody wins in this.

It's a good.

It's.

It's not some cutthroat Darwinian brinksmanship competition.

No, this is a show of goodness.

And it's a show.

It's a nutritious, wholesome show where people are happy for each other because they're finding art and artists they love.

And so everybody wins.

And that's rare.

That's rare.

You can make a TV show where everybody wins.

And so, of course, I should Say, by the way, that the art is affordable.

The art is affordable.

It's about, about finding art that's not going to break the bank, right?

Some, some, you know, families might have a thousand bucks.

Some families might have 5,000 bucks.

Some, some episodes, the person's only going to have a hundred bucks, right?

And we're gonna have to find art for them that works.

And that's going to be part of the challenge and part of the exciting part.

And, and so I'm thrilled about this idea.

I'm also thrilled that we're having interests.

We have interest from A and E networks, we have interest from hgtv, we have interest from pbs.

And, you know, we're confident that we get this show made.

We're going to find a home for it, and it's going to get distributed.

We don't really see it behind a paywall like Netflix or something, because we really do want it to be democratic.

We want it to be available to as many people as possible.

So we love the idea of being on cable or being on PBS or something like that.

This is.

Would be revolutionary for artists to have this kind of national and even international exposure.

Right?

And so we are just thrilled about Art House.

We're thrilled about Carmen being the host.

We're thrilled about our team.

Laura, Stacy, Brian, Dana.

I mean, we're, we're, we're, we're primed.

We're, we're pumped.

We're ready to go.

By the way, other people are, too.

Don't know if, you know, the arts organization out in New York City called Fractured Atlas, They've been on the show in the past.

Theresa Hubbard, the CEO, has been on the podcast.

And they love this show because they get it and they see it as an opportunity, as a platform to promote their artists across the country.

And they've even thrown in with us.

They're one of our, one of our investors in the show.

And so we're thrilled to have Fractured Atlas involved.

But that's all the good news.

We're still challenged because we need to get the money.

We need to raise the money.

We're an independent producer, we're an independent company, and we like to, you know, fund our own stuff when we can or raise the money to make the things that we want to make when we can.

And we're thrilled that Fractured Atlas threw in with us, but we still need to raise money.

We have a fiscal sponsorship with Arturo, which sponsors the show as well.

And because of that fiscal sponsorship, any donation is tax deductible.

And which is exciting.

And so what we've done is we've launched a crowdfunding campaign on indiegogo, and we need your help.

We absolutely need your help.

If you love art and artists, if art and artists are meaningful to you in your life, find a way, please, to give us 5 bucks.

Find a way to give us 20 bucks if you can.

And if you're flush this month and you can spare 100 bucks, I'm not going to stop you.

Please consider donating and supporting this project to the extent that you can and get that tax deduction.

We're also offering some really fantastic incentives, rewards, perks, as they call them, on the, on the indiegogo campaign.

There's a.

With the awesome official poster, the awesome official music playlist, the awesome official tote bag.

We have limited edition artworks, we have exclusive art prints.

Lots of amazing stuff there for you.

In terms of perks, if you want to go, if you want to do that, or if you just want to donate a few bucks and get the tax deduction, that would be great.

But we're trying to raise $150,000.

And the good news is we've already raised about 55,000, and we've had a couple serious donations.

We've had several people, you know, be incredibly generous and give us a thousand dollars here and there.

And of course, we've had some wonderful people give us, you know, 10, 20 bucks, 30 bucks, etc.

By the way, one of the perks that we have for 30 bucks is that you can nominate an artist, you know, you can nominate somebody to be a buyer on the show.

You can even nominate your community in your town for us to come to your community and shoot an episode of Art House in your.

In your town.

And you can do all that for 30 bucks.

And it's a tax deduction as well.

And so please, guys, we need your help.

We want your help, and we hope that you'll consider helping us raise this money that we need $150,000, or actually about $95,000 now to go back Chicago and shoot the pilot.

You know, $150,000 is a lot of money, a lot of money, but it's actually not a lot of money for this pilot.

I mean, the good news is one of the reasons we're going back to Chicago is because we did the proof of concept video in Chicago and we spent money on that, and we actually have, like, a lot of footage that we can reuse.

There's some cost savings by going back to Chicago is what I'M trying to say.

And so we can make the pilot for far less now than we would have otherwise.

And it looks great.

It's going to look great.

The proof of concept video looks great.

When you see it, you'll know, you know what it, what it, what it looks like.

And you're going to see it on the screen.

You're going to see how good it is because it truly is a high quality show because we have a world class team, right?

And so all you need to do is go to art housetvshow.com arthouse tv show.com to go to the crowdfunding campaign and make a donation there.

Of course, click on the link in the show notes, go to the website, we've got all kinds of articles and things@notrealart.com about the project that will lead you to the project.

And so we just are so grateful for everybody's support on this.

We're grateful for Fractured Atlas, we're grateful for all the generous donors that have already contributed and we would be so grateful for your generosity as well.

$5 would be so helpful.

As much as you can do.

Whether it's $5, $50 or $5 million.

Please consider donating, donating to our project today because this is going to be a game changer for artists.

Imagine a show where artists get national and international exposure.

Imagine a show where artists in Wichita, Kansas or Albuquerque, New Mexico or Madison, Wisconsin are able to get national or international exposure.

Eyes on their work, potentially millions of people with eyes on their work.

That's going to increase their business, that's going to put money in their pocket, that's going to increase their number of buyers and collectors to have this kind of platform that Art House is going to be for these artists that are on the show.

And also people get to learn about art making.

You know, people get to learn and that are these exotic, mystical, magical creatures called artists are actually human beings and they want you to come to their studios and meet them.

You know, show like Art House demystifies the art world and humanizes artists, is going to empower our audience, empower our fellow Americans and our neighbors, friends and neighbors, family to understand about art making and how to buy art, how to work with artists and, and that's going to be a game changer for how people learn about art and art education.

Art appreciation is going to be entertaining, it's going to be fun and it's going to be accessible to all.

So, you know, Art House is a game changer for, you know, for, for, for you know, for how art gets democratized.

And that's what we're doing.

We're democratizing art.

So please consider helping us.

We so appreciate whatever you could do.

I'm begging, I'm pleading, I'm on my hands and knees, got my hat in my hand, and I'm just so grateful.

I'm excited about this project.

We've come a long way, and we're.

We're.

We're going to get there.

We're going to get there sooner or later, and hopefully sooner with your help.

So without further ado, I want to wrap up.

You know, I've said my bit, I've said my piece, and I just am so grateful for your consideration.

And you know what?

If you can't financially support the show, that's great.

That's fine.

No problem.

Please, though, tell everyone you know about it.

Pass the word on.

Share it with people who might be able to, you know, write it, you know, make a donation or something.

That would be amazing.

Just help us spread the word.

Word of mouth is key these days.

Share it on your socials, tell your friends and neighbors, and that will be invaluable.

Invaluable to us as well.

And word of mouth cost you nothing, and we'd really appreciate that more than you know.

So that's it.

That's all I got today for my little soapbox auditorial, and just wanted to tell you the truth about Art House and why it matters and why we're excited about it and.

And just to see how thankful we are for your support, as always.

All right, that's it.

I'm out of here.

Have a beautiful week, and we'll talk to you next time.

Thanks for listening to the Not Real Art podcast.

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Not Relart is produced by Crew West Studios in Los Angeles.

Our theme music was created by Ricky Peugeot and Desi Delauro from the band Parlor Social Media.

Not Real Art is created by we edit podcasts and hosted by Captivate.

Thanks again for listening to Not Real Art.

We'll be back soon with another inspiring episode celebrating creative culture and the artists who make it.