Early in director Nathaniel Kahn’s new documentary, The Price of Everything, former Sotheby’s auctioneer Simon De Pury declares, “it’s very important for good art to be expensive.” At face value, the statement seems ridiculous. Surely, they’re mutually exclusive, right? While Kahn doesn’t necessarily disagree, his film (which opens in select theaters this weekend before hitting HBO next month), suggests that today, art is mostly a status symbol.
From auctioneers to historians and buyers, the breadth of people whom Kahn interviews is incredible. Many of them talk about art not in terms of skill or the emotion it evokes, but as any other product to be bought, sold or traded. One of them is Amy Cappellazzo, chairman of the Fine Art Division at Sotheby’s. While flipping through the book of an upcoming auction, Cappellazzo muses about how exciting it would be to auction Henri Matisse’s Dance. When Kahn asks her how much the piece would sell for at auction, she yells, “priceless!” takes a beat and then adds, “And then you sort of work back from there.”
Brassy as Capellazzo is, though, collector Stefan Edlis literalizes the idea of art as capital in the starkest way. Not only does he treat his stunning pieces (a Warhol Liz Taylor, a Koons gazing ball, a Damien Hirst preserved sheep) like commodities for trading, but as a replacement for currency as well. At one point, he explains his acquisitions by saying, “To be an effective collector, you have to be a decorator.” It’s blunt, but while he tracks his finances by what goods and services he exchanges for the stunning pieces of art history that fill his and his wife’s apartment, he’s less mercenary than some of Kahn’s other subjects.
Perhaps the most surprising is artist Jeff Koons. Though he’s known for giant, reflective balloon dogs and the aforementioned gazing balls, Koons previously worked on Wall Street in a “bucket shop.” That alone wouldn’t be damning, but then Kahn intercuts images of Koons’s ’80s, “greed is good” heyday with images of Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance in Wolf of Wall Street and the implication is clear: Koons is a shrewd businessman exploiting the art world at best and a grifter at worst.
Brutal as that moment is, Kahn’s style is mostly passive and his treatment of Koons is really about leaving the artist enough rope to hang himself with. Nowhere is that more evident than in the glimpses we get into Koons’s workshop. Though he conceives every piece made, he rarely touches them. While that system is arguably the natural endpoint of Warhol’s deliberately mass-produced pop art, it seems unlikely Koons would have allowed Kahn so much access to his process had he known the way he’d come off.
Kahn is far kinder to the other artists he interviews and one of the film’s great joys is the way it allows the audience to watch artists work. We see George Condo paint and repaint a piece as he talks about the effect commercial viability has on an artist’s output. We see Larry Poons painting on a canvas that spans the circumference of an entire shack on his rural property, a piece which became part of last year’s “Momentum,” which reintroduced him to the art world after a decades-long, self-imposed absence.
Poons was one of the artists who benefited from the art market’s abrupt commodification beginning with 1973’s Scull Auction and his seeming rejection of it mirrors the attitudes of many of the artists Kahn interviews. As Margaret Lee posits, “I don’t know if the art market loves artists.” Nowhere is that clearer than in the scene where Kahn films artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby watching her piece Drown sell at auction for $900,000 (it sold again for $3.1 million last year).
Though she explains that the piece was originally purchased for a much lower price and then flipped at that auction shortly thereafter, she doesn’t seem terribly bitter. Instead, her concerns with being a marketable artist are about the ways she might stagnate artistically if she tries to keep up with demand. More importantly, sales aren’t really her goal. Instead, she explains, the purpose is to get a piece into a museum to be seen at some later date—even if that means the piece goes into storage for years.
Though that seems almost counterintuitive, in the end, Kahn’s film seems to suggest that going into museum storage for a few years is better than seeing art go into some private collection. As art critic Jerry Saltz explains, he hates auctions because they mean a work disappears from public, sometimes with no hopes of returning within his lifetime. And while both routes mean that a work isn’t displayed for years, at least there’s the promise it will come back. Unless something changes or the art market bubble bursts, maybe that’s the best we can hope for.
Rating: 9/10
