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So here comes (Untitled) — a very funny and clever new indie comedy about the New York art scene, directed by Jonathan Parker (Bartleby) and cowritten by Parker and producer Catherine di Napoli. Yes, it's exaggerated, but comedies play on the exaggeration of real human foibles and situations, and this one skewers Art World foibles and situations with great accuracy and glee. It's also about the indie music scene, with the main character, Adrian (Adam Goldberg), a bitter experimental music composer who feels underappreciated — he's ahead of his time, of course. He gets romantically involved with Madeleine (Marley Shelton), a manipulative art gallery director, after being introduced to her by his artist brother Josh (Eion Bailey), whom she represents.
While Adrian keeps trying to launch his avant-garde music career without much success, Madeleine seems highly successful in featuring one "hot" artist after another in her gallery — and talking nitwits into buying the stuff. Meanwhile, Josh makes nice, nonobjective art — referred to as "beach art" at one point — so nonthreatening that it works well in corporate settings. Thus, his work sells, and keeps the gallery afloat. The rub here is that Madeleine sees Josh's work as lame and too commercial, and only peddles it from her "back room," whereas Josh longs for the fame and recognition of the main space. I had a chance to catch up with Jonathan Parker by telephone. I asked he was making fun of the art world?
"It has components of satire," Parker admits. "Yes, we are satirizing the contemporary art and music worlds." He believes he knows something about both, since he himself played experimental music in the 1970s and '80s, with about as much success as Adrian — which is to say, not much — and he has been an art collector, of San Francisco Abstract Expressionism. Parker gets diplomatic. "At the same time, we love all the characters. They all really believe in what they're doing — I was trying to get that across. They're not phonies." But what about all those pompous speeches about the elevated importance of art/music? He laughs and agrees that yes, maybe they did go to extremes.
How did they decide on New York as a setting? "We just felt like that was the most convincing city to set it in, especially on the music side," says Parker. "And frankly, we were looking forward to spending that time there — hey, fall in New York, that sounds pretty good! We thought of setting it in San Francisco, we may have thought briefly of setting it in LA. But overall, New York was where we wanted to make the movie." During the one-month shoot, they made ample use of New York actors and loft spaces in the Village, Chelsea and Brooklyn — Madeleine's gallery was built on a Brooklyn set. Apparently, they did do some under-the-radar research in real galleries — and Parker's son is a studio art major at NYU.
The resulting film is populated with recognizable art world types who spout hilarious dialogue. There's Josh, a passable artist who wants to be taken seriously, very seriously. There's egomaniacal Ray Barko (Vinnie Jones), who strikes me as a spoof of Damien Hirst during his taxidermy phase. Remember Hirst's series of preserved/dissected animal cadavers? Barko uses same, and comes replete with oversized ego. At one point he barges into the gallery complaining about the installation, declaring, "I reinvent myself everyday. I'm not the same person I was ... a minute ago!"
Barko's work includes three possums hanging from a chandelier, a deer with its body in a giant sack, a monkey sniffing the brush of a vacuum cleaner. Madeleine's justification for it? "Trying to read this work is a mistake," she says, "it's so personal."
Parker credits the pieces to Kyle Ng, a young artist in LA who was starting to make art with taxidermy. "My son Sam came up with a lot of the ideas for the pieces, and Kyle made them for us."
Finally, there's Monroe, nearly the opposite of Ray. Monroe (Ptolemy Slocum) is a Minimalist conceptual artist who is acutely withdrawn and socially awkward. His MO is to work with the most mundane objects — a pushpin, a light bulb that goes on and off, a drywall. There's a hilarious scene with Monroe trying to "hang" a pushpin on the gallery wall — he frets and stews about it, until finally, ah ... over here!
To me, the character of Madeleine is rather problematic. She's portrayed as an art world succubus, willing to charm and seduce and cajole her way to what she perceives as Art World Importance — as well as sales from insecure social climbers. The problem is, that her manipulations are obvious, and she seems too smart to take her own bullshit so seriously. Actually, even smart people get taken in by BS, especially when there's a whole scene behind it. We do get a lot of laughs from Madeleine's methods of persuasion. During a visit to Barko's studio, she tells her avid client, Porter: "By collecting it, you're not just writing a check, you're writing the history of Western civilization."
Meanwhile, Porter, a dot-com millionaire looking for some purpose in his exceedingly affluent life, has internalized the spiel. "Collecting is about expressing yourself," he says to a woman he's trying to impress. "Making creative decisions, like selecting and purchasing."
She asks innocently, "Like shopping?"
"Yeah, but ... shopping within the entire context of art history." ■