Brother act ... Dinos and Jake Chapman. Photograph: Rosie Greenway/Getty Images
Reality TV is the defining format of the decade, so it was only a matter of time before artists started exploiting it.
The entire oeuvre of Turner prize nominee Phil Collins examines the shady issues surrounding the format. He has employed reality TV directors for his film pieces and staged press conferences with reality TV veterans. In his recent exhibition at Victoria Miro - entitled The Return of the Real - Collins questioned the manipulation of reality TV formats and allowed former participants of programmes like Supernanny and Wife Swap to explain how they believe the programmes damaged their lives and manipulated what happened. After all, isn't reality a subjective experience?
This year the interaction between art and reality TV is going a step further. Jake and Dinos Chapman have been lined up as celebrity hijackers playing God on the new version of Big Brother, launched last night. It's a desperate attempt at celebrity involvement without actually locking up the Z-list - something that seems unlikely to happen again in the wake of Shilpa-gate. The show allows celebs to choose how they torture the imprisoned 18-21-year-old wannabes.
Big Brother Hijack is an unusual choice for the Chapmans given that they have previously railed against the entire concept of artistic celebrity. When I interviewed them in 2005, they spoke about the media's sensationalised coverage of the YBAs. They questioned some of their contemporaries, observing: "The work is now a by-product of their celebrity - that's quite an odd thing. That whole sort of quite intense pessimism, intense fatalism, has now turned into the kind of megalomania that it was supposedly attacking." So, a change of mind perhaps?
It's frightening to think what Jake and Dinos might do to the housemates. Tie them up and watch them have sex with blow-up dolls? Make them act out some nihilistic performance involving Hitler, Ronald McDonald and nursery-rhyme characters? Force them to make toy panoramas of war, cannibalism and the apocalypse? The art world waits with baited breath.
