From Fifty Shades of Grey to Beverly Hills Cop:A Brief History on the Role of the Art World in the Movies
There’s a great scene in the 1999, film She’s All That, where cool guy Zack (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) is trying to impress Laney (Rachel Leigh Cook), the artsy nerd girl he’s attempting to make popular, by going to her open mic performance art night. An artist and his collaborators—two little people—emerge from a neoprene sheet, one of the collaborators issue a single line of poetry: “My soul is an island; my car is a Ford.” Laney comes on stage and does a very sensual, modern dance while repeating the phrase, “Be silent, be still,” and all four of them embrace.
Zack is then goaded up on to the stage—if he’s so into performance art like he says he is, he should get up there. But Zack actually knows nothing about performance art. So he improvises; he pulls out a hackey-sack (that paragon of the ’90s hippie boy cool) and starts mumbling about how everybody is watching and that he should “never let it drop.” The hackey-sack drops, and Zack says, “Sooner or later, it has to drop.” It’s meant to show a vulnerable side of Zack, and it’s that moment when Laney starts to actually like him.
Without even getting into the absurdity of a “performance art open mic night”—or the fact that someone could fall in love over some improvisation—She’s All That captures a sort of perfect misunderstanding between mainstream media and art. The mainstream sees art as a sort of self-indulgent ruse, and which may be one reason the arts are often seen as superfluous by governments around the world.
Performance art is, again, pilloried in Todd Solondz’s 2011 film Dark Horse, when Selma Blair’s depressive character is surprised that Jordan Gelber’s cheerful character is able to withstand her sadness. “Are you for real? And you’re not being ironic like performance art or something?” she wanly asks him.
He replies, “I suppose it’s true most people would describe me as having an ironic sense of humor, but I’m definitely not into performance art or anything like that. No way.”
The storyline of Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals centres around the stunning and insomniac art dealer Susan (Amy Adams) who runs a gallery in Los Angeles
Despite their nearly unassailable status in the art world, artists themselves are not immune to filmic mockery. There’s Julianne Moore’s painter in The Big Lebowski, whose swoops naked through the air in a harness over her canvases to splatter her Pollock-like paintings with a brush, and who speaks in an indiscriminate Eastern European accent. And don’t forget Catharine O’Hara’s character—Lydia’s mom—in Beetlejuice, whose grotesque sculptures almost kill her when the movers nearly drop one on her from a crane (“This is my art and it is dangerous!” she exclaims), and that also landed her on the cover of Art in America.
In the 2010 comedy, Dinner for Schmucks, co-starring Paul Rudd and Steve Carrell, the artist character (played by Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement) is entertaining a crowd at his opening—a series of massive self-portraits—quipping, “Sometimes I’ll be working on a piece, and I’ll think, ‘No. This is bullshit,’ so, I will literally rub bull excrement on the piece as a metaphor.”
Not all cinematic depictions of art are lampoons. Several scenes in Neil Labute’s 1998 black comedy, Your Friends & Neighbors, take place in an art gallery—Catharine Keener’s character meets a sexy gallerist and starts an affair with her. Each of the characters is seen looking at the paintings, and their interpretations reveal their character traits; it’s actually quite a neat device. The film puts its artistic credentials on it’s sleeve in the opening credits: painter Alex Katz did the title art.
In addition to comic relief, art can be the subject of untold horrors. Early in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, a brilliant 1970 Italian giallo film directed by Daria Argento, a novelist witnesses a man with black gloves murder a women in an art gallery, and the writer spends the rest of the movie helping a detective track the murderer down.
Fifty Shades of Grey features a number of artworks including an Ed Ruscha painting on the wall of billionaire’s Christian Grey’s office
In Irvin Kershner’s The Eyes of Laura Mars, a photographer played by Faye Dunaway starts to see visions of murders, and the photographs she stages—the photographs in the film are by Helmut Newton—are identical to unreleased photographs from crime scenes. And the film The Cell, starring Jennifer Lopez, is notable for its nearly identical plagiarizing of works by Damien Hirst, Odd Nerdrum, and H.R. Giger as setpieces for the frightening dreams inside the mind of a serial killer.
And then, of course, there’s the granddaddy of all art in film: A Bucket of Blood, a Roger Corman-directed masterpiece from 1959, in which a failed artist starts entombing his victims—first his neighbour’s cat, and then a cop, and a model—inside of sculptures. (A Bucket of Blood is actually a remake of a 1933 film called Mystery of the Wax Museum, and was remade itself by Roger Corman in 1995, only notable for it being Will Ferrell’s first ever film).
Art pops up in action films as well. The final violent sequence in this year’s John Wick: Chapter 2, starring Keanu Reeves, is set in a fictitious museum called the New Modern NYC (something between MoMA and the New Museum), in an exhibition called “Reflections of the Soul,” a perplexing mirror-maze, as if Doug Aitken and Yayoi Kusama collaborated. A recorded voice intones upon entry, “Within this exhibition, the interplay of light and the nature of self-image coalesce to provide experiences which will highlight the fragility of our perception of space and our place within it,” while Reeves runs through it, destroying much of it while killing several dozen hitmen.
clockwise: In the blockbuster movie from the 80’s Beverly Hills Cop, the plots leads Eddie Murphy, a.k.a., Axel Foley, into an art gallery filled with hilarious modern sculptures; Art starts to become part of the investment portfolio: Gordon Gekko’s (Michael Douglas) office is filled with blue-chip art in Wall Street; Cautious handling is also an issue in the movies: In Beetlejuice Delia (Catherine O’Hara) yells at the movers to carry her sculptures carefully; After an accident, brilliant sculptor Walter Paisley covers his landlady’s cat in clay to hide the evidence
In Beverly Hills Cop, a popular action comedy from 1984, Detroit cop Axel Foley’s (Eddie Murphy) investigation into a murder leads him to a Beverly Hills art gallery, where he encounters an installation of mannequins sitting at a dinner table with rotating mannequin heads on plates—a sort of unholy meeting of Marina Abramovic and the Chapman Brothers. Again, it’s meant as a sort of mockery of art and Axel asks the gallery’s director how much something like this goes for.
“Get the fuck out of here!” Axel exclaims.
“No, I cannot, it’s serious, because it’s a very important piece,” the director, with his non-distinct European accent, replies.
And then, there are the movies that are completely about art. The Family Fang (2015) stars Jason Bateman and Nicole Kidman as the children of infamous performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang, who “improvise public events that incorporate their own children into the artwork.” The Fangs simply throw themselves into a space as if they were hand grenades, and wait for the disruption to occur.” Now grown up, the kids deal with what their parents put them through when they were young.
Tim and the eccentric artist, Kieran, at the gallery of his fiancé in downtown Los Angeles
The movie has a few knowing winks, like a scene where an ArtForum critic debates with a Village Voice critic about the value of the Fangs’ work.
Perhaps, the most salient film about the art world is (Untitled), a black comedy that follows a new music composer played by Adam Goldberg who refuses to sell out, even when a sexy gallerist tries to set him up with opportunities. Along the way, we meet a Hirst-ian character (played by former football player Vinnie Jones), who is crushed under his own sculpture; an obsessive-compulsive minimalist, and loutish collector.
Similarly, Art School Confidential, a Terry Zwigoff film from 2006, runs the gamut of art clichés. At Strathmore Institute, actually filmed on the campus of Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, young Jerome tries to become the “greatest artist of the 21st century.” References to Christopher Wool, Chris Burden, Cy Twombly, Yves Klein, and Mark Rothko are all dropped in.
Pecker, a 1998 film by John Waters, follows a precocious photographer from Baltimore who winds up at a big gallery show in New York, before realizing that Baltimore is really where he wants to be (Cindy Sherman actually makes an appearance). Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art (also from 1998) lays bare the relationships of a Nan Goldin-esque photographer. Then there’s Trance, Danny Boyle’s 2013 heist film, where an auctioneer plays a role in the theft of Goya’s “Witches’ Flight.”
In Wallstreet Gekko’s walls are stuffed with works by the likes of Joan Miró, Picasso, George Condo, and James Rosenquist
There are several commercial films made by artists, like Cindy Sherman’s revenge movie Office Killer (1997), Robert Longo’s 1995 sci-fi thriller Johnny Mnemonic (also starring Keanu Reeves), and Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007).
And finally, there is the placement of art as a prop, often as a signifier for wealth. The most famous example of this is Wall Street (1987), made in the excess of the 1980s, when art was starting to become an investment. Gordon Gekko’s walls are stuffed with works by the likes of Joan Miró, Jean Debuffet, Picasso, Jim Dine, Julian Schnabel, George Condo, and James Rosenquist, who actually makes an appearance in the film.
Christian Grey’s walls are similarly filled with expensive art in Fifty Shades of Grey (2015). He’s quite an astute collector, with works by Rob Pruitt, Rodney Graham, Ed Ruscha, the Chapman Brothers, and John Baldessari. It’s not surprising art plays a big part in the movie—the director was Sam Taylor-Johnson, a blue-chip artist herself, who has shown at galleries like White Cube and Matthew Marks.
Young Jerome tries to become the “greatest artist of the 21st century” in the movie Art School Confidential
Nocturnal Animals (2016) is, similarly, made by someone with deep ties to the art world. Tom Ford, who made his name as a fashion designer, is also a known collector of art. In the film, a young art dealer is caught in a loveless marriage and a growing discontent with the art world. The film opens with a gallery exhibition—a sort of performance made up of obese women reclining on plinths—and a big part of the movie revolves around a road trip to Marfa, Texas. The film is also “curated,” featuring works by artists like Sterling Ruby, Richard Misrach, Joan Mitchell, Jeff Koons, and Damien Hirst.
In some ways, even though the art part fades a bit into the background after the first 20 minutes or so, Nocturnal Animals contains the most honest depiction of an element of the art world by a filmmaker. It’s not used as a plot device or a visual gag, but a way into the character, to help describe her, and to show that she’s independently wealthy from her philandering husband, to show that she’s a professional. For art’s co-mingling with the movies is complex—the art world is rarely portrayed with much sensitivity or normalcy. And that’s okay: sometimes the art world acts more like the characters in She’s All That anyway.
This Feature Got Published in TheArtGorgeous Magazine#2 – to Download e-version click here
Writer MAXWELL WILLIAMS
photos vis TheArtGorgeous Magazine
