Art critics can be bitchy. The year Andy Warhol died, Barbara Rose began a review: "Andy Warhol has sunk back into the commercial ooze from which he emerged." Dan McCoy's horror satire, Velvet Buzzsaw (Netflix 2019), chronicles the richly deserved comeuppance of a fickle, bitchy art critic, a man whose capricious reign of terror is, paradoxically, ended by his encounter with something like true art. The film has a primitive ("unhip" one might say) allegorical premise: the protagonist and his corrupt cohort regard art as a commodity, an investment for the ultra-rich, but real art insists on authenticity and takes a grisly revenge on the characters. Curiously, the glittering, decadent surface of Velvet Buzzsaw conceals a moral. McCoy, whose previous film featured Jake Gyllenhal as a vicious, tabloid reporter (the movie was Nightcrawler) has a didactic purpose -- he wants to impress a moral point on his viewers. True art raises the stakes -- it makes demands on us: great art doesn't fail us, we fail it. Unfortunately, McCoy's narrative in Velvet Buzzsaw isn't exactly up to the demands that he places on it -- the film disperses its energy in lots of subplots that don't cohere into any meaning and the movie's horror film aspects are more than a little cheesy. Nonetheless, the movie makes some interesting points, has very funny caricatures of art world luminaries, and affords an interesting peek into a world of privilege and decadence that most of us can imagine only imperfectly.
Velvet Buzzsaw involves three competing galleries. We meet their owners in Miami at the Art Basel exhibition. Striding through the show like an emperor is Morf (Gyllenhal), a witty, fearsome, bisexual art critic. Morf's reviews can make or break artists and he's completely corrupt -- he inflates reputations for his own benefit or at the urging of the art galleries; he is willing to destroy an artist merely because his girlfriend of the moment, Josephina, wants an ex-lover humiliated. Although he has a good eye, the merits of the work are less important to him than the power that his internet-posted reviews brings. The three galleries involved in the film compete with all sorts of blandishments for artists that they deem "bankable" -- they are disloyal and as corrupt as Morf, mistreating their staff as wholly disposable; one of the movie's jokes is that the mousy receptionist who keeps finding mangled corpses in the galleries bounces back and forth between the three enterprises -- the bosses abuse her and she keeps getting fired. Morf's main task, performed in cahoots with the galleries, is to extract from the public eye valuable works of art so that they can be locked-up by wealthy investors. People have storage units full of art -- Morf keeps a Twombly in his unit -- and to avoid a glut of valuable art deflating market prices, the characters are willing to hide works, secrete them away, and keep them from public exposure: it's all about supply and demand. (Public institutions, here LACMA in Los Angeles, collude in this process -- inflating and deflating art prices by what they agree to exhibit.) This bluntly satirical portrait of the art world gives rise to several subplots: an older alcoholic artist (John Malkovich) has lost his edge when he stopped drinking -- in one scene, an eager-beaver gallery owner tours the artist's big factory where prints of his earlier works are being manufactured only to find that during the past year the old painter has only produced a single canvas, and an unsuccessful one at that (it looks like two ten foot colored tadpoles on white canvas) -- instead, he spends his time in his huge empty studio shooting baskets. Morf leaves his boyfriend for Josephina, an employee of Rhodora (Rene Russo), the owner of the biggest and most powerful, gallery, Haze. Josephina, who uses sex for power, betrays Morf for an up-and-coming graffiti artist. The characters conspire to place a room-size silver sphere in the LA museum -- it's a little like a Henry Moore version of the big globular mirror in the park next to Chicago Art Institute. Another artist has built a mechanized hobo, a homeless man who is wired to begin conversations: "Once I had a train..." a reference for those in the know to the one of the early gold-diggers musicals in which a hobo says: "Once I had train...made it run on time...buddy can you spare a dime" -- this is part of the famous "Forgotten Man" musical number that ends the show. (This element of Velvet Buzzsaw is indicative of what makes the film alluring, although in a shallow way -- it's got a lot of inside information that only the cognoscenti will appreciate: I assume that the characters in the movie all refer to real gallery owners ("Haze" for "Pace" for instance) and that the more you know about the art world, the more titillating the film.
Destructive to this corrupt milieu is the influence of real art. An old man, Vetral Dease (everyone in this movie has picturesque Thomas Pynchon-esque names) drops dead. He turns out to have left an apartment full of spectacular paintings -- most of them menacing and sinister images of small children playing with fire or fighting one another. Dease has left instructions that this art work, some of it painted in actual blood, be destroyed on his death. But Josephina who enters the man's apartment recognizes that it is a gold mine -- the painting is so fascinating and its back-story so horrific (torture and child abuse) that the works will be immensely valuable. So she empties the apartment, hides the paintings, and sketches, and, then, is forced into an alliance with the vicious Rhodora to put these works on the market. (Dease is modeled on Henry Darger, the Chicago janitor, whose apartment was discovered to be filled to overflowing with strange manuscripts and thousands of paintings and collages -- Darger seems to have been obsessed with little girls and there is a suspicion, unfounded, I think, that he even murdered a little girl. He was an orphan, state-raised, and had been horribly treated as a child himself. But he had a drive to make art that is astonishing in its sheer nightmarish power -- one of his works is a 15,000 page novel about a planet on which child slavery is endemic and the violent revolt of the child slaves. Darger's work is too disturbing for a relatively slight film like the Velvet Buzzsaw and the canvases featured in the movie look like a baffling blend of paintings by the British artists Stanley Spencer and Francis Bacon.) The problem is that Dease's painting have occult powers. And they can activate other art works to take revenge on human beings as well. One by one the principal characters are slaughtered by the art that they have (to use George Bush's term) "misunderestimated." Authentic art has power -- it can change lives -- and this is what the venal characters in the film have forgotten. Dease's terrifying pictures fascinate and hypnotize people -- and they bring to life other art works, inspiring them to kill their owners. This horror aspect to the film is creepy, but not really scary and the deaths are elaborate, gory, and supposed to be funny. And, in fact, it's fun to see the monstrous folk in the movie harried to death by their own art. McCoy's point is that authentic art poses real risks -- art isn't merely decorative: it can establish criteria by which we lead our lives: There is an element of ecstasy and doom in great art. Dease's paintings are memento mori that have the literal ability to inflict death on those who behold them.
There's a famous story about Andy Warhol. The famous art critic and curator, Henry Geldzahler, looked at a painting by the artist and said: "You've left the art out." Warhol replied: "I knew I forgot something." The people in Velvet Buzzsaw have forgotten what art is supposed to be about. And, so, this is a lesson that they have to re-learn.
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