‘Everything’ brilliant, captivating docu By Owen Gleiberman

Del Toro to produce next films for Lopez, Castaneda

Every so often, when you hear that a painting by Picasso just sold at auction for a record $179 million, or that a Pollock or a Basquiat or a Jeff Koons now routinely fetch prices worthy of a Silicon Valley start-up, it’s easy to wonder what, exactly, is going on. Is this a true expression of the art’s value? Or is it the symptom of some skyrocketing hothouse bubble that has decadently transformed art into gold?

“The Price of Everything,” Nathaniel Kahn’s brilliant and captivating documentary about how the art world got converted into a money market, is shrewd enough to know that the answer is both. The movie gazes, with a good amount of woe (but also with the pleasurable voyeuristic charge that tends to accompany displays of great wealth), at what the art world has become: the staggering auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, where masterpieces, old and new, are put on the block to be sold at prices that are 10 times higher than what they would have fetched just 15 years ago; the elite private collectors who are the ones snapping up all the paintings — a global demimonde of connoisseur/investors who, over the last three decades, have made the art market into a de facto stock market, complete with trading and flipping and commodities futures.

And the artists themselves? A majority of the superstars are dead, a handful are alive, but either way they’ve been turned into iconic blue-chip corporations, with their paintings treated as a luxury brand.

It all sounds, on the surface, quite greedy and vulgar and trendy and disreputable. And it probably is. Yet “The Price of Everything” isn’t a simplistic rant against the money culture. Early on, an auctioneer from Sotheby’s makes a highly intuitive point: that great art, almost by nature, needs to be greatly valued (and by that he means expensive), because that’s the culture’s way of protecting it. If a Rembrandt or a Da Vinci or a Bruegel weren’t regarded as “priceless,” then it wouldn’t survive through the centuries. And who gets to determine how much a given piece of art is worth? There’s no formula; on some level, it’s the collective voice of curators and critics and the public. The point is that the market may appear decadent, but that doesn’t mean it’s false. It’s an expression of something: what the culture values. When the works of Andy Warhol began to fetch prices comparable to those of Picasso, it was because the perception of Warhol’s aesthetic had risen in the world. And rightly so.

Yet if “The Price of Everything” acknowledges the organic (and compelling) aspects of the art market, it also points to the ways that something has gone very wrong. This is far from the first documentary to take on the symbiotic dance of art and money, but Kahn, best known for the 2003 confessional portrait of himself and his father, “My Architect,” has conceived the film in a way that’s at once journalistic and philosophical. “The Price of Everything” is an expose that’s also a freewheeling meditation on what art is.

Fantastic

Kahn, a fantastic interviewer, got access to a major range of inside players from the art world. He talks to the gallery owner Mary Boone, to collectors like the hawkish 92-yearold Chicago philanthropist Stefan Edlis (who loves beauty, but can pinpoint the commercial value of a single brushstroke), to auction-house heavies like Amy Cappellazzo, chairman of the Fine Art division of Sotheby’s, who’s like a puckish Sigourney Weaver character, caught between her art obsession and her capitalist fever, and to artists like Gerhard Richter, who claim (with a wink) to decry the system that has elevated them.

The movie reveals how the current wave of art-commodity mania started in the ’70s — specifically, on Oct 18, 1973, the day that Robert Scull, a New York taxi-fleet impresario who was a passionate collector of abstract expressionist and pop art, sold off 50 of his most prized works in an auction at the Sotheby Park-Bernet Gallery. At the time, the prices were jaw-dropping (though they now sound firesale cheap). Jasper Johns’ 1961 “Target,” for instance, was sold for $135,000. The painting is currently in the possession of Stefan Edlis, who bought it in 1997 for $10 million, and says that it’s now worth $100 million.

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LOS ANGELES:

Mexican director-writer Issa Lopez was sitting in the audience at Guillermo del Toro’s second of three master classes when the recent Academy Award winner revealed that he planned to produce the next films of two women helmers over the next two years: Animator Karla Castaneda and Lopez.

“You should have seen my face when he mentioned my name,” she told Variety.

Castaneda, whose stop-motion animated short “Jacinta” won at the 2008 Guadalajara fest and who took the Mexican Oscar equivalent, the Ariel, for her second stop-motion animated short, “La Noria,” in 2013, is working on her feature debut in the same medium. Del Toro is planning on providing further impetus to the animation film industry in Mexico.

Lopez began as a writer of hit Mexican romcoms such as Disney’s “Ladies Night,” and Columbia Pictures’ “Casi Divas,” which she also directed, and then made a surprising turn to genre filmmaking last year with the critically acclaimed “Tigers are Not Afraid” (“Vuelven”), which counts on Stephen King and Del Toro among its fans. She was also a co-scribe on Gabriel Ripstein’s 2015 Berlinale Best First Feature winner, “600 Miles,” which deals with the less frothy themes of cross-border drugs and weapons smuggling.

Written and directed by Lopez, “Tigers” debuted at the Fantastic Fest 2017 where she became the first woman — and Mexican – to win the Best Horror Feature director award. It also made a sweep of the major awards at Screamfest 2017, where it won Best Picture and Best Director among other prizes. “We’ve won 14 prizes so far but we still have 22 genre festivals ahead of us,” she said. (RTRS)