Want to make a funny but worrying film about the way we live now? The art world has everything you need. With its po-faced claims that mediocrity is genius, its jaw-dropping celebration of naked wealth and its cast of pretentious curators, rapacious dealers and power-mad critics, it’s an industry that’s begging to be ridiculed.
And sure enough, art-world satire is becoming a mini-genre of cinema. In Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 film The Great Beauty, one image of emptiness inscrutably observed by Toni Servillo’s character Jep is a performance in which an artist rams her head against a Roman aqueduct. Four years later, in Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winning The Square, museum cleaners mistake installations for garbage, while a PR company’s attempt to popularise “relational aesthetics” results in a viral video of an exploding child. They’re terrific fun, but how accurate are they about contemporary art?
Dan Gilroy’s new film Velvet Buzzsaw, launching on Friday night on Netflix, is the most splenetic art-world satire yet. Gilroy previously savaged TV news in 2014’s Nightcrawler, a powerful trawl through LA’s seedy underbelly. Here, he turns his disillusioned lens on the city’s booming commercial galleries. The only cure for the blatant corruption of today’s dealers and critics, Velvet Buzzsaw implies, is a massacre.
It starts as an apparently realistic look at wheeler-dealing, with a critic, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, delivering his verdicts at Art Basel’s Miami art fair and Rene Russo as a scheming gallerist. It then mutates into a grisly comic horror, as these heartless scumbags get their hands on a haul of haunted art. What makes the horror funny is that all the awful things that happen to the greedy monsters – having an arm chewed off by a sculpture, being sucked into a street painting – come across as fully deserved.
Satire doesn’t have to be true to be fun. But behind the black comedy, Gilroy is deadly serious. “I would say it’s 100% accurate,” he says of Velvet Buzzsaw’s harsh portrayal of the art world. He cites recent HBO documentary The Price of Everything, which examines the financial extremes of art today. “There’s no question that price-fixing is going on.”
In Velvet Buzzsaw, we see Toni Collette’s “art adviser” Gretchen strong-arm a museum into showing works her client owns in order to inflate their price. Gilroy claims this really happens. Does it? The only inaccuracy, I suspect, is that the museum needs to be bullied. Any public museum that shows new art is self-evidently enhancing the work’s value. To be fair, that was also true when the Royal Academy put a certain JMW Turner’s latest work on its walls.
The problem today is that so much money washes through the art scene that prices have become absurd. What we accept as normal is in reality part of an insidious system created to generate cash. Gilroy calls it “completely rotten”.
“We are a lot like lobsters in a pot,” he says. “You become inured to something and you don’t even know whether it’s good or bad.” The character who most spectacularly suffers from this is Gyllenhaal’s, who at first seems forthright and independent, making and breaking careers without fear or favour. But then, to please his girlfriend, he agrees to write a bad review of a show by her ex – even though he likes the work. Then he starts to realise how his words can, and have, been used to fix prices.
The discovery – or rather the theft – of a dead artist’s “outsider” paintings offers the horrible characters in Velvet Buzzsaw a potential goldmine. This is where the film gets really outlandish, and yet galleries do in fact make great play of representing the estates of dead artists – it’s clearly a major source of income. And it’s also a metaphor for the way the market benefits itself, rather than artists.
“I’m trying to say that art is more than a commodity,” Gilroy says of his film. “It’s been over-commodified.” He undoubtedly hits some truths. So much so that no one actually denies them. The art world protects itself with layers of irony and sophistication that turn blunt facts into “blunt facts”.
For me, The Square perfectly pinpoints the way the art world feels, at least from a European perspective. It captures the exaggerated seriousness with which contemporary art is often taken and the surreal blend of intelligence and idiocy with which it is discussed. Its curator antihero is morally flawed rather than outright evil. And no one gets slaughtered by cursed artworks.
There is, course, no doubt who will get most out of Velvet Buzzsaw. Art insiders will take glee in identifying Gilroy’s targets – does the fictional Haze Gallery sound a bit like the Pace Gallery, and which gallerist shares Rhodora Haze’s punk past? – and lapping up its appalled acknowledgment that their world is, after all, pretty glamorous. And the money will keep flowing.
