A keen eye for the art of satire
By Michael O'Sullivan
Friday, Nov. 6, 2009

The first big laugh in "(Untitled)," a smart and funny satire of the contemporary New York art scene, comes, unsurprisingly, via a sight gag. Looking out from a concert poster, the face of avant-garde sound artist Adrian Jacobs (Adam Goldberg) stares down the viewer, his expression a frozen mask of resentment. Here's the joke: Why would anyone want to look at -- let alone listen to -- this jerk?

Wait till you hear the, ahem, music.

In performance, Adrian bangs at piano keys with his forearms. His clarinetist (Lucy Punch) alternately abuses her instrument and makes caterwauling noises with her mouth. The percussionist (Lawson White) crumples paper. Halfway through, Adrian's own parents walk out. No wonder he's angry. The unwashed masses don't understand genius.

Adrian's brother Josh (Eion Bailey), on the other hand, is a golden boy. A painter, Josh cranks out abstract canvases that his tony downtown dealer Madeleine (Marley Shelton) sells for $10,000 a pop. Never mind that they hang in hotel lobbies, not museums, and that they all look exactly the same. "I keep returning to this form again and again," he says, pointing out a formless blob in one of his pictures.

The battle lines, it seems, are drawn, in this portrait of artistic sibling rivalry from director Jonathan Parker, who co-wrote the acid-tongued script with Catherine DiNapoli. On one side is artistic purity. On the other, the sellout. And they both want to sleep with Madeleine.

Except that nothing is so straightforward in Parker's jaundiced vision of the struggle between creativity and commerce, which plays more like a Socratic dialogue than any dogmatic statement of who's right and who's wrong. After a while, you get the feeling that the filmmaker both loves and hates each brother -- and what he represents -- in equal measure. Adrian may be an angry buffoon, not a genius, and Josh a talentless hack, but they're good people.

Others in the film don't fare so well. There's Ray Barko (Vinnie Jones), a pretentious, bad-boy British installation artist given to wearing bathrobes (like real-life artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel) and working with taxidermied animals (like the real-life British bad boy Damien Hirst). There's collector Porter Canby (Zak Orth), a dot-com gazillionaire who opines, with a perfectly straight face, about Barko, "What attracts me to his work is how uncomfortable it makes me feel." Then there's Monroe (Ptolemy Slocum), an idiot-savant conceptual artist whose work consists of such everyday objects as trash or a thumbtack. Not a sculpture of a thumbtack, an actual thumbtack. Adrian has one of the best lines in the film: "When I crumple paper," he says, "it's music. When Monroe does it, it's stupid."

Which reminds me of an old joke (not in the film) about how many artists it takes to screw in a light bulb. Answer: 100. One to actually screw it in, and 99 to say, "I could have done that."

If there's any hero in this equal-opportunity-offender film, which is filled with too many art-world-insider jokes to count, it's Morton Cabot (Ben Hammer). Apparently based on the late John Cage, the 90-year-old composer issues what is the film's real moral, and one that can be taken as a direct response to a silly, text-based painting hanging in Madeleine's apartment that reads: "NO YOU SHUT UP."

"Everyone has an opinion," says Cabot, reacting with equanimity when someone criticizes his work. "An artist must find meaning . . . in the process."

At Landmark's E Street Cinema. Contains crude language, brief nudity, mild sensuality and art made from sex toys and animal carcasses.