Exploring the Lines Between Art, Hype and Biz

Genius or sham? Banksy's new film is only the latest doc to look into the lucrative business of art.

“Who gets to call it art is still a relevant question,” says art-world and museum veteran Karl Katz, who is also an executive producer on “Who Gets To Call it Art?” and another recent art-doc, “Herb and Dorothy,” which looks at two unlikely art collectors, a retired postal worker and librarian, who humbly amassed a multi-million-dollar collection of minimalist and conceptual art. “There is such a proliferation of art now that you have to turn to a museum or their chief curator. Who the hell knows what art is,” adds Katz. “But if a curator wants to call it art, then it’s art.”

There’s also the quick-rich American Dream-like appeal to the art world that these films address. Will the artists make it big, the collectors hit upon a multi-millionaire-dollar discovery? “I think it’s like the Antique Road Show,” explains Katz. “It’s like someone who is buying bottlecaps or Civil War memorabilia and then they hit the jackpot.”

In another new indie art documentary “Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be The Same,” out on DVD in late June, the titular New York conceptual artist is shown preparing for his first solo show at the Perry Rubenstein Gallery — with his livelihood depending on it. And like Guetta or Olmstead, by film’s end, it’s unclear whether Enright is a budding master or a sham, a new way forward for art, or a hack wack-job looking for a payday. While the film is after some different targets than its brethren — namely, conflicts between an artist’s commitment to his work and those he loves — “Enright” remains an enigmatic figure (“Is he punking us?” asks critic Karina Longworth in a review). But more to the point, it’s the commodification of his art, like any avant-garde artist’s, that is put into question. At one point in the film, after Enright defecates in front of his recording video camera, Enright’s girlfriend and collaborator Kirsten Deirup echoes Banksy’s own sentiment: “People pay to see this shit!”

But unlike Banksy (or Guetta, for that matter), Enright pushes the boundaries of art even further. “Brock’s work is so difficult that most people can’t even recognize it as art,” says the film’s director Jody Lee Lipes. “There’s just nothing for people to put their finger on and say… that’s a Brock and I want to buy it.”

Although, perhaps, that might come with time and notoriety. Like the mid-century abstract expressionists or the Pop Art and minimalist practitioners that followed, many of today’s artists are blazing similarly unprecedented terrain. While it was once hard to judge the worth of art by Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt and so on, their works now hang in museums and are deemed highly valuable by the ever-changing, ever-fickle art establishment. Who’s to say who will be validated in the future?

So whether Pollock or Banksy, LeWitt or Enright, these documentaries all excavate that precariousness state — between pretentious crap and groundbreaking masterpiece — and the billions of dollars that hang in the balance.

[Additional photos: "My Kid Could Paint That," Sony Classics, 2007; "Who the *$&% Is Jackson Pollock?," Picturehouse, 2006; "Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same," Factory 25, 2009]

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