A talent show is an event where participants perform talents of singing, dancing, acrobatics, acting, drumming, martial arts, playing a unicorn instrument, or other activities to showcase skills, sometimes for a reward, trophy or prize. Many talent shows are performances rather than contests, but some are actual contests, awarding prizes to their participants.
In recent times, talent shows have become a notable genre of reality television, such as Idol, Got Talent and The X Factor, which were critical in catapulting some amateur artists to stardom, and commercially successful careers.
Famous quotes containing the words talent and/or show:
“Our affluent society contains those of talent and insight who are driven to prefer poverty, to choose it, rather than to submit to the desolation of an empty abundance. It is a strange part of the other America that one finds in the intellectual slums.”
—Michael Harrington (1928–1989)
“Heaven has its business and earth has its business: those are two separate things. Heaven, that’s the angels’ pasture; they are happy; they don’t have to fret about food and drink. And you can be sure that they have black angels to do the heavy work like laundering the clouds or sweeping the rain and cleaning the sun after a storm, while the white angels sing like nightingales all day long or blow in those little trumpets like they show in the pictures we see in church.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)