Review of Blurred Lines Documentary About the Art Market
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Marina Abramovic appears in Blurred Lines: Inside the Art World (photo by Barry Avrich)
The apparent thesis of director Barry Avrich's new documentary, Blurred Lines: Within the Art World — that the art globe might benefit from some regulation — will surprise exactly no 1 who works in the industry. Neither will much of his footage.
Divided into multiple segments — "Artists," "Dealers," "Collectors," "Museums," "Sale Houses," "Fairs," etc. — the picture first introduces the major sectors of the art globe and and so offers an cess. Artists, with a few highlighted exceptions (Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst), proclaim their devotion to their work and aversion to problems related to the marketplace. Art fairs come beyond every bit soulless playgrounds, comparable to shopping malls. The featured dealers range from art enthusiasts to market manipulators. Curators and biennials receive cursory mentions, while art publicists get none. Avrich interviews multiple critics, merely fine art publications seemingly don't merit their own department — perhaps side by side fourth dimension, some of the previously unmentioned publicists could assist elevate our profile. The titular phrase comes from an interview, early in the pic, with Museum of Modern Fine art Director Glenn Lowry, who speaks about the difficulties of defining contemporary fine art. The title grows to encompass the tenuous divisions between art making and commerce, collectors and institutions, "good" and "bad" art.
Certainly, Avrich has assembled a fissure team. Throughout the moving picture, big proper noun interviewees include artists Marina Abramović, Rashid Johnson, Adam Pendleton, Sterling Ruby, Julian Schnabel, and Taryn Simon; gallerists David Kordansky and Lawrence Luhring; museum directors Michael Govan and Lowry; collectors Valeria Napoleone and Michael Ovitz; author Sarah Thornton; and auction powerhouse Amy Cappellazzo. Blurred Lines offers those unfamiliar with the ecosystem an easy-to-follow account of a murky, entangled field. Avrich creates a fun, heady picture show that highlights the quirky characters and questionable antics that govern a very, very niche community. His endeavor at racial and gender diversity among his interviewees is laudable, though information technology would accept been nice if he'd as well explored how issues of inequity yet shape the marketplace.
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Rashid Johnson appears in Blurred Lines: Inside the Art World (photo by Ken Ng)
Watching the picture show with some insider knowledge of the art world offers unlike pleasures and insights. Commencement of all, yous might recognize how quickly things alter. Avrich includes a photograph of dealer Larry Gagosian with his arm effectually Schnabel who, terminal spring, defected from his powerhouse gallery to bring together rival Pace. Brett Gorvy speaks as Chairman and International Caput of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie'southward, while shots of Dominique Lévy seem to foreshadow his impending partnership with the dealer. Andrea Rosen, who closed her Chelsea space this past winter, speaks every bit a major gallerist. These shifts, which of course Avrich couldn't have foretold, give credence to the larger themes of instability, uncertainty, and flux that he highlights. It'due south not just the prices of art or the mood of the market that are volatile: it's also the people who inhabit this fast-paced, baroque world, and the positions available to them. This creates a kind of craven-and-egg problem. Is the art world wild because eccentric people gravitate toward and end up running it, or exercise its inherent structures (whatsoever those may exist) and lack of regulation drive people crazy?
Avrich also highlights some winning juxtapositions. The film opens with footage related to the September 15, 2008 bankruptcy filing of Lehman Brothers, immediately followed by footage from the next mean solar day's Hirst sale at Sotheby's, Beautiful in My Head Forever, which raised $200.vii million. The disconnect betwixt fine art market stakeholders and the residuum of the world becomes immediately credible. "There is a certain kind of intellectual snobbery that comes with dismissing all art fairs equally some horrible upshot that just sees the unfolding of a venal art globe at its maximum expression," Lowry reprimands, as two baldheaded drag queens with brilliant pink purses, ostensibly in the center of a fair, emerge on screen. Critic Christian Viveros-Fauné proclaims, "culture gets hurt," and Avrich cuts to footage of an fine art fair.
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Julian Schnabel appears in Blurred Lines: Inside the Art Globe (photo by Ken Ng)
However, the director avoids acknowledging more complicating details, like the fact that Gagosian, whom he characterizes as an enigma and a perpetrator of art globe evils, as well represents artist Taryn Simon, whom he portrays every bit an advocate for fine art making free from financial consideration. Gagosian isn't merely an enigmatic villain, Koons and Hirst are only two of the artists he has represented (Hirst left in 2012), and artists are complicit in their gallery representation equally well. Avrich doesn't reveal much complexity in any of his characters, which would have been a more than hard and peradventure stylistically inappropriate choice, though perchance a more interesting one, besides.
As a kind of Art World 101, a call for regulation, and a who's-who primer, Blurred Lines works. Equally a piece of art, it tin seem a bit simplistic. The film fails to raise interesting new questions or delve securely into unexplored territory. The end of the film seeks to reply why anyone should care nearly art market place issues at all. The interviewees advise that artists intendance because the market place operates to their detriment, and that that'south the biggest trouble with the whole organisation. Over again, probably not a novel notion if you're already reading this website, merely a nice reminder nonetheless.
Blurred Lines: Inside the Art World screens at the Tribeca Film Festival at 9:45pm on Wednesday, April 26, at 3pm on Thursday, April 27, and at 9pm on Sabbatum, April 29.
Source: https://hyperallergic.com/374740/a-documentary-introduction-to-the-art-world-with-star-power-and-obvious-ideas/
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