The person who first put me on to Life Lessons, years ago, was the artist Walton Ford, who has a show of new paintings opening at Max Hetzler in London later this month. Like most of the art world folks I spoke to, he doesn’t hold the new class of art world movies in very high esteem.
“I loathe almost all films about artists and the art world—although, like you mentioned, much of Life Lessons holds up,” he tells me. “I particularly can’t stand most of the clichéd attempts to parody pretentious artists and dealers. I didn’t even find the Julianne Moore vaginal artist in The Big Lebowski amusing.”
When pressed for good examples, Ford mentioned Wim Wenders’s The American Friend, Jean Renoir’s La Chienne, and the movie it’s based on, Fritz Lang’s Scarlett Street. Hamrah also mentioned three classics, rather than recent attempts: An American in Paris by Vincente Minnelli, A Bucket of Blood by Roger Corman, and La Belle Noiseuse by Jacques Rivette. He also mentioned the young New York filmmaker Michael Bilandic, whose 2021 picture Project Space 13 takes place in the performance-space realm.
Matthew Higgs, the director of White Columns, recommended the 1961 UK film The Rebel.
“It’s an early send-up of the tensions between straight and bohemian cultures. Every British artist—of a certain age—would know the film!” Higgs tells me.
In 2019, the writer Randy Kennedy interviewed the critic Todd McCarthy on this very subject. McCarthy admitted that it’s long been tempting for directors to focus a narrative on the artistic temperaments of a painter—but that this dynamic is difficult to get right. He suggested that only an actually working visual artist could capture this universe’s quotidian reality—someone like Julian Schnabel, an artist who’s been more successful than most at alternately making work for a white cube and directing films.
“I imagine only a real painter, like Schnabel, would indulge in these moments because nothing’s really happening when, in fact, this is where everything is happening,” McCarthy said. “It’s very difficult, and more often than not bogus, for films to pretend to show where inspiration comes from, but Schnabel is able to indicate it.”
I asked Kennedy, who edits the magazine Ursula, for his thoughts on the phenomenon of art world movies. He said that the “ones I don’t like and that really get it wrong are too numerous to list”—though Kennedy praised the Jack Hazan pseudo-doc about David Hockney and his swingin’ London coterie, A Bigger Splash, which is indeed a fantastic film. (Even if I had pre-disqualified it for this exercise due to its documentary elements.) Ditto American Splendor, which mixes animation, documentary footage, and live action to tell the story of comic artist Harvey Pekar. Kennedy also gave a shout-out to the absolutely incredible art gallery scene in Beverly Hills Cop, in which Bronson Pinchot plays a sales assistant with a ridiculous accent—maybe the ne plus ultra of silly art world parodies.
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