The New York art world does such a wonderful job of satirizing itself that further assistance hardly seems necessary. But with “(Untitled),’’ writer and director Jonathan Parker takes for granted the trumped-up stakes, the humorlessness, and the artists’ capacity for opportunism and willful absurdity. The players in this movie are cynical, but, amazingly, Parker is not. His movie works as a serious comedy in which the assorted players - a couple of artists, some gallerists, and the people who attend (or don’t attend) their shows - discuss what art is, what it should aspire to be, and what kind of people collect, exhibit, and consider it.
(Untitled)
Portrait of the art world exhibits humor, not cynicism
Adrian Jacobs (Adam Goldberg) is a doomy composer loosely of the John Cage performance-art mold. He plays with the sort of ensemble that crumples newspaper, drops a chain into a metal pail, bangs, blows, and bleats. One performance begins with the woman who plays the clarinet screaming, “Hiii Ya!’’ The auditoriums are mostly empty, but one evening Adrian’s brother, Josh (Eion Bailey), brings a date, Madeleine Gray (Marley Shelton), the owner of a Chelsea gallery where Josh is desperate to show his enormous bland abstractions.
Though she won’t exhibit it at the gallery, Madeleine has just sold a batch of Josh’s work to a hotel chain, but it’s “challenging’’ stuff like Adrian’s assaultive anti-music that turns her on. Even after he mocks her disruptions during his performance (her coat squeaks, she fans herself), she invites him to play during the opening for a new show by Ray Barko (Vinnie Jones). Ray is a hot bad-boy Brit. He specializes in the kind of taxidermy that made Damien Hirst rich and notorious. One Barko has a monkey sucking from the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner. “It’s easy to see why Ray’s a star,’’ Madeleine says. Once the camera has peered around the installation, that line seems pretty funny, but she’s not kidding. His pretentious, overblown pieces thrill her in the same way that Adrian’s sound-art does.
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