07 October 2007

"My Kid Could Paint That" (2007, dir Amir Bar-Lev)

Buy what you love, because if you buy art as an investment, you're playing a loser's game. Not a losing game, necessarily, but a loser's game, a game played by people with too much money and too little interest in natural gas futures or real estate. Art is meant to be lived with, to instruct and enlighten and enrage and love, yet much of the best of Western art (at least; how the fuck would I know about any other kind?) is locked up in temp-controlled storage units owned by the wealthy. With the wine, maybe. (Ha! Of course not -- totally different temps required. Wow, that's a filthy rich person's sidesplitter right there!)

Imagine pouring your heart and soul and possibly risking your life or risking exile to produce a work of art, and now, however many years later, it's locked in a giant closet in Sylvester Stallone's house, or Lars Ullrich's. Want to see art used as an investment? Watch the Metallica doc "Some Kind of Monster" and see Lars sell off his Basquiats and whatever. Let's hope there is no afterlife or there are bound to be some very disappointed paint-spattered souls up there.

But here's where I'll contradict myself -- art almost always has been defined by patronage, and I'm thinking that's the way it should be. Pieces produced for a specific purpose, often erotic (I think most major art museums should just be called what they are: "Museum of the Depiction of the Female Butt, Plus Some Saints and Jesus to Alleviate Resultant Guilt"). This whole bit of nonsense about one soul expressing himherself is kind of...well, the work's going to go on the auction block one way or another, isn't it? So it isn't so much expressing one's soul as it is guessing what other souls will want to see. Patronage. (Oh, and HINT: the other souls mostly want to see naked female butts, and/or war scenes and/or people being eaten by sharks.)

All I'm getting at is that I saw Amir Bar-Lev's doc, and although I was enraged for the first ten or fifteen minutes by the fact that I paid eleven dollars to sit in a theatre with six other people and some dopey woman STILL came right up to my seat in the back and asked to see my ticket because I had apparently sat in her ASSIGNED SEAT (Jesus, what is this, EUROPEAN SOCIALISM WITH THE ASSIGNED MOVIE SEATS?) -- I mean, for Christ's sake lady, there were only four other people there and you still walked down my row and said "Excuse me" to climb over my legs and you still bumped me out of my seat, I mean THIS IS AMERICA, LADY! -- so, fine, she picked the seat I should've picked, all's fair and I moved to another seat in only a 95% huff, and I was then further enraged by the fact that Amir didn't seem to have complete command of the focusing ring on his camera, so most of the interview sequences in the early part of the movie (with the journalist lady in overalls, and with Mark-the-dad) were fuzzy and, seriously, I paid 11 dollars to sit there watching a movie by a guy who couldn't manage to shine enough lights on his subjects and maybe needs new glasses.

But this movie was fantastic, really, and I think it comes down to Amir's niceness. He's so nice, it seems, that I feel I can call him by his first name. He's humble. He's not today's style of doc filmmaker, which is too often someone who wants to make narrative films with Angelina Jolie but needs to do something cheap and provocative first in order to get noticed. He's not a jerk with a camera looking for an expose or looking to make a point about society such that he'll edit his footage to fit it no matter how poorly his subject matches his theme --

(oh, I just watched "The Staircase" on DVD, CAN YOU TELL? Fascinating to watch and all, but damn there must be some kind of reverse libel statute that doesn't let you cover up so much of a real incident to fit your "American Southerners are homophobes and fools who consider justice a cotton-picking nuisance, and women are important only insofar as they are cute and doubtless golddigging and wear their hair in ways we find appealing", THAT MEANS YOU Jean-Xavier de Lestrade (writer/dir) and ESPECIALLY YOU Denis Poncet (producer), thanks for including the DVD extra of your own views on the case that explains your movie and it's creepy slant) --

...uh, where was I? Right, Amir. He's a nice guy who wanted to catch the painting prodigy in her ascendancy, and who's heart was, I think, genuinely a bit broken when he came to the inescapable conclusion that daddy was "helping" the prodigy to employ shape/form/repetition and theme in her paintings. You know, the things that a four year old couldn't employ or formulate. The things that make the paintings appealing and that make them sell.

Well, no. They sell because of the story behind them, and that's fine because lots of art is like that. "Guernica", or Motherwell without the Spanish war is...what? Mondrian without the move to New York and the influence of jazz is...not the same, I think. So the people who buy little Marla (+ big Mark's, I think) paintings are not being duped in any way that any art buyer isn't duped.

This is why people need to buy what they love. The price point is beside the point. I can give you a compare/contrast scenario to illustrate (no pun intended) what I mean: Norton Simon vs. Seymour H. Knox, Jr. Visit the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena and you will see a wonderful, passionate, cohesive collection by a man who loved art, who especially loved Degas and his little cast horses. There's a viewpoint to this museum, and an expansive generosity. Now hop on a plane to Buffalo and visit the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. This collection is shit, and I'm not just saying that because I stupidly made a special trip to the frozen center of hell (Buffalo in winter) just to see it. It's shit because it's clearly the work of a rich guy, and subsequent acquisitions directors, who decided to cherry-pick from the big names in modern art. This is a collection meant to impress with it's price tag, and the works are strung up in a stiff line like the Von Trapp children reporting to Captain Dad. Entering that gallery is like walking into a party where all the guests are big name but have no relationship with one another and simply stand around glumly with drinks in their hands. This gallery left me cold, while the Norton Simon makes my heart pound with the possibilities of humanity. I can't tell you how angry it makes me that some wonderful stuff -- a side of beef by Soutine, my beloved "Yellow Christ" by Gauguin -- is stranded in the art-prison of the Albright-Knox.

So the Marla controversy is really about money and art, about the acquisition position. It isn't about the dopey "controversy" over whether modern art is "real" art -- I mean, god, are we still worrying about that? We aren't, are we? I'm sure Morely Safer is, but the rest of us? (Go paint more hotel rooms and relax, Morely.)

(Oh, shit -- I just realized how poetically perfect the Marla/Morely naming alliteration is! I would totally do that if I were naming these characters in a novel! It's FATE!)

The movie works because it doesn't stoop to Safer-cynicism or Wallace-skepticism with the subjects. Amir lets them talk. He asks the needed questions and lets their faces tell the story. He, miraculously, gets the gallery owner who made his fortune (? Or some good amount) off of Marla to admit what we movie-goers suspected an hour earlier: that he, a frustrated photo-realist painter, was championing Marla in order to stick it the art community and their inexplicable love of the quick-'n-easy and the abstract. It's a story of revenge and ego and the desire to be special (Mark, this means you). It's MacBeth. So, of course, it's tragedy, but a small tragedy, after all. Amir sympathizes with the family, especially Mom Laura and Non-Prodigy Zane, and we sympathize with all of them, too. I'm sorry you guys got into this, that your weaknesses let it happen. Weaknesses like a need for expression, a need to be heard, love of your children, loyalty to your family, not wanting to hurt or doubt the ones you love, and money-is-good. Nice, meaty, human weaknesses.

But seriously, if you're buying Markla's paintings, you'd better do it because you love them, not because you're hoping to cash in. Don't be an ass about it. This isn't "F is for Fake" territory here, so don't pretend it is.

My mom had these little blue Chinese dragons, book ends, when I was growing up. I loved them. I saw some just like them years later in a (closed) store in Boston's Chinatown and took a photo of them. Lately, I saw them on sale at Plantation LA for $250. My mom says she bought them for something like $25. It's not that they've become valuable all of a sudden -- it's that the Plantation LA buyer went down to some Chinatown somewhere and you did not, so you pay a premium.

But no matter how much or little you pay, it doesn't matter, so long as you love your dragons.