For art, the price is not right
Are the deliriously exorbitant prices that great and some not-so-great art sell for at the world’s most prestigious, if not always most discerning, auction houses a good thing or a bad thing? You may not quite figure out the answer to that by watching the art world documentary “The Price of Everything,” directed by Nathaniel Kahn of the great 2003 film “My Architect,” a searching, globe-trotting, remarkably poetic portrait of his late father, the master architect Louis Kahn. “The Price of Everything” introduces us to Jeff Koons, an avid self-promoter and huckster whose horrible (to me anyway) work, including those iconic chrome-plated, twisted-balloon bunnies and poodles, commands the highest prices in the world. We also meet aged New York artist Larry Poons, an original Abstract Expressionist, who was lost in the shuffle when the work of those artists went through the roof and whose canvases suggest what might happen if Monet gave up representa- tion and just went with colors. Koons and his “lobby art” are ready for the scrapheap of history, a bad taste bubble as far as I’m concerned. The amusingly crabby Poons, on the other hand, is rediscovered in the film. We also tour the art-stuffed (yes, Koons included) home of ancient, jovial collector extraordinaire Stefan Edlis, a Chicagoan who escaped Nazi Germany and amassed a modern art collection of incredible value. We also encounter chairman of Sotheby’s Fine Arts division Amy Cappellazzo, who behaves like a bottle of Champagne about to pop its cork and who puts together catalogs with the purpose of catching the eyes of Manhattan’s richest hedge fund managers. You know, the sort of people who need a place to park their money and may care more that the art matches their sofas than how much it costs. In addition to Koons and Poons, “The Price of Everything” explores the work of Marilyn Minter, who dem- onstrates her combination of photography and paint layering for the camera, and the young artist and new mother Njideka Akunyili Crosby, a Nigerian-American from Los Angeles, whose paintings also incorporate layering and are beginning to demand high prices. The great German artist Gerhard Richter seems embarrassed by the prices his paintings and other works bring and suggests that he would rather see them in museums, something Cappellazzo dismisses as so much “democratic-socialism.” At a time when a Da Vinci “Salvator Mundi,” a painting of dubious provenance and even attribution sold in 2017 at Christie’s for over $450 million to a prince in Abu Dhabi, all bets are off. For the record, I think Poons’ paint-covered pants should be worth more than anything by Koons.
(“The Price of Everything” contains obscenely overpriced art.)