The exhibition with Scaffold Gallery is fast approaching and we’re beginning to collate our research and decide on what to make. It’s titled ’14 Ways To Get Rich Quick’ and it’s an exhibition styled as an artists’ response to (as you’ve probably guessed) a get rich quick guide. We’ve got ‘invent something’ and ‘exploit people’ which is why we’ve been looking into fictional artists such as Gilda Dent (thinking down the invent path). This research is about looking into how art and artists are portrayed within popular culture. It led us to The Cultural Norms Theory; the theory states that the medium provides a ‘definition of a situation’ which the actor believes to be real. This definition provides guides for action that appear to be approved and supported by society. The theory was born from the notion that television characters do influence viewer behaviours. We’ve also been sourcing various instances of art and artists being referenced in films and TV. Some examples are Rachel Rosenthal and David Hyde Pierce in ‘Frasier’; Jennie Garth and Jason Wiles in ‘Beverly Hills, 90210’; and a possible favourite is Chris Eigeman in ‘The Next Big Thing’. It’s a brilliantly terrible portrayal of an artist and seems to perpetuate the notion that if you’re an honest, hard-working painter who just can’t break into the art world, it’s probably because you’re a boring person. It seems like people want their artists to suffer. The stereotype made famous by Van Gogh, and beaten to death by the media ever since, is basically the entire ethos in the premise of the film. Gus Bishop (Chris Eigeman) is a struggling artist who pays the bills doing clerical work of an unspecified nature. His generically pleasant paintings would feel at home in a hospital waiting room, and like most of us who pass such artworks en route to getting our flu shots, the art world doesn’t even notice them.
Things change when a petty thief named breaks into Gus’s apartment and steals one of his canvases. He pawns it off on his landlord with a made-up back-story about the mysterious and reclusive artist, a drug addict and incest survivor who also served in Vietnam. The landlord then sells it to his friend’s daughter’s gallery, adding that the artists family was killed by a tornado that ripped through his trailer park, and literally overnight, the art world is buzzing with intrigue. This ‘artist’s past’ thing is still something that is responsible for a work being recognised as ‘good’ or ‘important’ and so this layering of narratives and histories onto this one work doesn’t make it good film but it’s an interesting idea none the less. It’s become like an intentional Chinese whispers where no one knows what’s ‘true’ and what’s ‘false’ anymore.
To return to the story, the thief entangles Gus in a ‘get rich quick’ (which is a nice link to the Scaffold exhib’) scheme to sell more of his paintings under this false identity, convincing him that he doesn’t have what it takes to make it in the art world by himself. He does this by saying ‘you’re not gay, you’re not a junkie, you don’t paint with your teeth. You’re a middle-class white kid from New Brunswick, New Jersey – zero sex appeal.’ Pretty bizarre considering all we seem to hear about is that all artists are white middle class men – he seems to be the ideal candidate! But anyway, the scam works, and the thief positions himself as the artist’s exclusive representative, handling all of his business transactions with galleries and the press so no one ever sees him. We have no idea why people think artists have reps but this could be a potential area to go down – appoint a representative for us or maybe even make one up by using the descriptions from the film. We think that we’re meant to be rooting for Gus through all of this – he just wants to make a living from his art, and it seems the only way to do that is by working the system. But there is nothing to like about him because he is so boring (as the plot requires). He is as humuorless as his art, neither of which makes for compelling cinema. Having once been rejected by the art world, he is a reluctant ‘everyman.’ Looking in from the outside, he condemns it for its duplicity and pretentiousness, jealous of his own alter-ego, and uses this to justify his crime. After his colossal success, Gus finally gets fed up with his role in a corrupt system and exposes himself as a fraud. By doing so, he also reveals the hypocrisy of the art world that fell for his deception. Nearly every art world character in the film is a clown, carrying on melodramatically with an air of silly entitlement. Turtleneck-wearing arts administrators throw around meaningless artspeak in a boardroom. Some favourites are ‘He’s an anti-positivist!’ or ‘He’s a trans-realist!’. All said while catty dealers and collectors trip over themselves trying to get their piece of the glory. The exception is an art critic whom Gus falls in love with because she writes glowing reviews of his work (and she’s pretty).
The film wants to operate as a cultural commentary (before deciding to become a rom-com right at the end). But it’s too unambiguous in its moral position to hold any real depth or complexity, and the cringe-worthy performances make light of any serious critique it might offer. It made us wonder whom the audience for such a film might be when all that’s left is a string of obvious goofs and gaffs about an easy target that’s too specialised to attract mainstream interest. So perhaps that’s where the art happens? It’s not at the inception of the work, but it’s receival. It’s what happens beyond the parameters of the screen. Stuff that might happen if these events actually occurred in the world we live in or perhaps after the film has finished. The work could possibly manifest itself as a conversation/interview between us and all the people in these sorts of films who ask if the wannabe artist is ‘gonna get a job doing paintings once school’s done?’ to quote ‘Art School Confidential’. We’ll do some more thinking about this over the next couple of weeks.
