There are few capitalist recreactions as confounding and uninteresting to the hoi polloi as investing in art. Though everyone understands the concept and can perhaps appreciate the economic dynamic at work, most people find the effort involved, not to mention the enormous amount of money needed, to be beyond the pale. Nathaniel Kahn has thus managed to make a documentary for those of us who don’t see the point, if only to clarify that the point is not as esoteric as we think it is. Art is money and always has been. It’s just that in our post-modern world the artists have figured out a way to make it pay for themselves now rather than others in the future.
And, of course, some stubbornly try to not make it pay; or, at least, not make themselves slaves to money rather than their art. In order to present this dialectic, Kahn gives us the comically rhyme-fixated duo of Jeff Koons and Larry Poons, two artists who represent opposing axes of the art-commerce matrix. Koons is the former investment banker-turned-conceptual artist who is probably the richest maker of art in the world at the moment, having learned quite quickly how to leverage auction houses to make his future art more valuable. Kahn’s most important contribution to the conversation is showing how auctions don’t merely make dead painters even more famous, but also how past works of living artists boost their standing for future works, which is why Koons can get a couple of million for one of his balloon animals since the owner knows he can sell it down the line for even more.
Poons, on the other hand, is a former wunderkind abstract expressionist who essentially turned his back on the commercial art world and retreated to the underground to work on things that he had not intention of selling. But as Kahn shows, even that kind of reputation counts for something monetarily. It’s only a matter of time that interest in Poons, cultivated by art aficionados who would like to see him reclaim his place in the canon, develops into a kind of frenzy, and when he premieres his latest monumental piece—a painting that takes up a whole room—the cognoscenti are out en masse. Kahn doesn’t take this fable to the next level, and we don’t know if Poons, who is already quite old, cleaned up, but you can bet somebody else did thanks to his resurgence.
The documentary has other deep dives worth pondering, in particular its portrayals of a clutch of wealthy collectors who really do seem to have nothing better to do. Their understanding of the value of the work they own is not limited to monetary concerns—they know their aesthetics—but under Kahn’s close scrutiny their explanations add up to little more than a scrim of cute idiosyncrasies. In that regard, money actually makes more sense as a measure of the value of a work of art. We really have come that far, and gone that low.
Opens Aug. 17 in Tokyo at Euro Space Shibuya (03-3461-0211).
The Price of Everything home page in Japanese.
As fly-on-the-wall documentaries go, Ron Mann’s small-scaled portrait of a venerable Greenwich Village guitar shop should make even Frederick Wiseman green with envy. Due to its location and hard won reputation, Carmine Street Guitars can expect quite a few celebrity guitar aficionados to drop in on a regular basis, which means all Mann had to do for the five days he shot the film was just hang out. There’s not a lot of explication in the movie—no voiceover or text cards—but Mann knows what the audience wants to know and is able to extract this information with as little prompting as possible.
As he approaches the twilight of his career, Mike Leigh, perhaps the best and certainly the most idiosyncratic of British filmmakers, has increasingly turned to history to explore his feelings about what it means to be English. His two most prominent historical films, Topsy-Turvy and Mr. Turner, dwelled on the world of the arts, offering Leigh a means of looking at his position on the vector of creativity. His latest, however, is bitingly political, even polemical. It addresses an incident that happened on August 16, 1819, in the city of Manchester. A peaceful pro-democracy demonstration was attacked by British soldiers dispatched by local leaders. Dozens were killed and hundreds injured. Dubbed “Peterloo” because of its temporal proximity to the fateful battle that defeated Napoleon and the fact that it took place on St. Peter’s Field, the event, according to Leigh, should be taught to every British school child, but it’s mostly been lost to time. With his usual scrupulousness, he shows how the massacre came about and what it means for today’s world.
It’s easy to see why Robert Zemeckis was attracted to the true-life story of Mark Hogancamp. Zemeckis’s brief since the Back to the Future series has been fantasy that comments on who we are right now, “we” being invariably Americans. Hogancamp, an illustrator who lives in upstate New York, was assaulted by a group of neo-Nazis who objected to his cross-dressing habits and left him with scars, brain damage, and severe PTSD, all of which ended his career and deprived him of much of his memory. In order to cope, he turned to dolls, and interpolated his struggle into a World War II action tale about him and a group of multi-cultural female commandos taking on German soldiers. He would set up tableaux with the dolls and then photograph them. These photos were recognized as pieces of art and Hogancamp became famous, though the fame only worked to exacerbate his psychological problems—or so Zemeckis’s movie would have you believe.
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David Lowery’s career so far has produced one of the weirdest bodies of work of any young director: the 70s pastiche Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, the surprisingly affecting family-friendly fantasy Pete’s Dragon, and the ambitious occult-psychological study A Ghost Story. His latest, clearly a vehicle for Robert Redford to leave the acting profession on his own terms, has almost nothing in common with those three previous films except casting: Redford appeared in Pete, and Casey Affleck, who plays a police detective here, was in both Saints and Ghost (the latter, however, mostly under a sheet).
Xavier Beauvois takes an unusual approach to a war movie. Though he opens on a battlefield strewn with corpses during World War I, his film very rarely addresses the brute terror of warfare. Like Satyajit Ray’s memorable Distant Thunder, it mostly looks at the effect war has on those who are not at war, in this case the French farmers who continued to till the land during and after World War I. Not surprisingly, these farmers tended to be women, since the men were either fighting or already killed, and the special attention that women bring to agriculture is emphasized through action, word, and sensibility.
Actor Paul Dano took on a lot when he decided to adapt Richard Ford’s 1990 novel as his directorial debut. Dano does not appear in the movie, and neither does his significant other and co-scenarist Zoe Kazan, but there’s something of the pair’s storied flair for the quirky and unexpected in both the story and the way they pull it off. Ford’s book takes place in the 1960s, in a backward backwater in Montana, where a family of three has relocated. The father, Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), is a golf pro who has given up competition to take a job at a local country club. The town is overshadowed by a mountain that seems to be constantly on fire, a situation that’s the source of a lot of local black humor. The mother, Jeanette (Carey Mulligan), is a housewife who, at first, seems resigned to her fate of constant motion for the sake of her husband’s ambitions, which only go as far as his pride. The teenage son, Joe (Ed Oxenbould), is, according to Jerry, destined to be a distinguished football player, though Joe is so unassuming that you can’t imagine him giving or receiving a tackle.
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