"When did beautiful become so fucking ugly?"
(Untitled) is an interesting case in that it's in many ways a poke-fun-at-weird art movie, but it's a little more insider than that, and the satire has moments where it's close enough to real life that it stings a bit. It's like somebody making fun of a friend, and it's funny at first, and then it crosses the line and you feel a little defensive.
One challenge I'd like to see films like Art School Confidential and (Untitled) take on it is help people also like it, which is supposed to be the other hand of satire (technically, in satire, you
are supposed to propose a solution). The film tries, by having the lead character Adrian, played by Adam Goldberg (who makes cliche atonal sound art and says things like ""melody was invented by corporations to sell pianos"), go to a "great performance" at one point in the movie. But the great sound art, although played on mugs is pretty melodic and approachable - the stuff he hates, right? So that doesn't really make the case that experimental stuff can be mind-blowing.
The film also features Damien Hirst-style work and conceptual fare - some of it funny, like they can't open the door of the artist studio, and they finally push it open - the obstacle was a the rubber doorstop - and then you see wall text "rubber stopper blocking door" (2007).
And allow me to cut and paste the plot from the press kit:
"In addition, there is the duality of art for its own sake and art as a commercial venture--a paradox that finds its external representation in the front and back rooms of the Chelsea art gallery where Adrian isinvited to perform his music. For the gallery's owner, Madeleine, the front room is exclusively for exhibits by artists she finds interesting, where commercial appeal is irrelevant--or even a drawback. The back room, hidden from the eyes of the world like some dirty little secret, is
where she keeps the commercially viable art that allows the gallery to exist."
Inevitably, someone in the comments will knock me for even acknowledging a movie that makes base fun of "our" art, but, as you'll see on Friday (when the blog goes in a radical new direction), that satire is important to me, fiction is important to me, and to look critically at ourselves - even if it's not constructive criticism - is also important to me as well. My own personal dilemma du jour is that I fear that after so many years of training myself to be open myself up to the experimental that I've lost judgment and can't tell the dark from the light. And when I look at a few pieces in this movie and they only strike me as foul because they're in the context of a spoof, that shakes me a bit.
I'll end with factoid from the press materials:
Where did the visual art from (Untitled) Come From?
All of the pieces were created specifically for the production. When Los Angeles artist Kyle Ng, who Parker met through Sims creator Will Wright, revealed he had a taxidermy collection, that became the medium for fictitious artist Ray Barko's work. It was Parker's son, Sam, an NYU art major, who came up with many of the ideas for Ray's taxidermy art. Those concepts were then executed by artist Kyle Ng.
Some of the stuffed animals were rented. The huge cow, for instance, came from a prop shop in Burbank and had to be crated, then shipped to New York and back, di Napoli says.
The hotel chainfriendly canvases painted by Bailey's character, Josh, were actually provided by Brooklyn-based artist Frank Holiday.
Where did the sound art from (Untitled) Come From?
The film's original musical score was composed by David Lang ... only previous film work was writing arrangements for the Kronos Quartet on the Clint Mansell-composed score to director Darren
Aronofsky's 2000 film Requiem for a Dream. He says he was flattered by Parker's invitation to be involved in (UNTITLED). "Jonathan contacted me and said he was making a film about a composer who writes silly avant-garde music and then has this moment where his music changes and he starts writing more from his emotions.
As for the on-camera compositions that Adrian and his ensemble perform, they were a combination of music Lang wrote for the film and the cast's own improvisational efforts, Parker says.
He..... ended up playing the recorded music back and then turning it off and just letting the cast improvise.
"The idea that they go to a concert that the lead character is supposed to like and it's my music was very flattering for me," Lang says. "There are all these old Hollywood films where people go to concerts and it's not particularly good music because it's fake music. This is real music. It's a great opportunity for a composer."
More factoids from the press materials:
Another piece of real music in the film is by Austrian-born American composer Arnold Schoenberg, who was the model for Mann's main character in Doctor Faustus. One of Schoenberg's key contributions to the musical world was the so-called 12-tone technique, whereby all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are given more or less equal importance, so that the music avoids being in a particular key. "Even today, 60 years after Schoenberg's death, it sounds alarming and disconcerting to the vast majority of people," Parker says. "That's a pretty great accomplishment. If you're involved in these worlds, it's not new. But, it still has the power to sound quite new to audiences who are not as familiar with them."
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