Untitled: "Not another 'but is it art conversation!'"
(Untitled)
Portrait of the art world exhibits humor, not cynicism
Zach Orth portrays a rich guy who becomes a collector to diversify his portfolio, and Marley Shelton plays a gallery owner who's into "challenging" art in Jonathan Parker's (Untitled)." (Parker Film Company/Samuel Goldwin Films) By Wesley Morris Globe Staff / November 13, 2009
The New York art world does such a wonderful job of satirizing itself that further assistance hardly seems necessary. But with “(Untitled),’’ writer and director Jonathan Parker takes for granted the trumped-up stakes, the humorlessness, and the artists’ capacity for opportunism and willful absurdity. The players in this movie are cynical, but, amazingly, Parker is not. His movie works as a serious comedy in which the assorted players – a couple of artists, some gallerists, and the people who attend (or don’t attend) their shows – discuss what art is, what it should aspire to be, and what kind of people collect, exhibit, and consider it.
Adrian Jacobs (Adam Goldberg) is a doomy composer loosely of the John Cage performance-art mold. He plays with the sort of ensemble that crumples newspaper, drops a chain into a metal pail, bangs, blows, and bleats. One performance begins with the woman who plays the clarinet screaming, “Hiii Ya!’’ The auditoriums are mostly empty, but one evening Adrian’s brother, Josh (Eion Bailey), brings a date, Madeleine Gray (Marley Shelton), the owner of a Chelsea gallery where Josh is desperate to show his enormous bland abstractions.
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