Once, when lined up to go through a maze in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, a guy behind me, from Brazil, said, the whole point of this modern art is to make you feel like s___.
So we have a satire of modern art and modern music, or at least the apparent attitude of the artists, without a title, that is “(Untitled)”, from Jonathan Parker and Samuel Goldwyn Films. Adam Goldberg plays Adrian Jacobs, the avant-garde composer who works with ordinary objects (like pails) as percussion instruments. His brother Josh (Eion Bailey) sells correspondingly avant garde paintings, but his stuff works only for people who collect for the sake of collecting. Madeleine Gray (any inspiration from the Madeleine of “Vertigo”?) befriends Josh while running her gallery, and then tests him, shall we say. Monroe (Ptolemy Slocum) carries all this even further, with one piece consisting of a red dot, which he calls “Untitled”, and with other pieces like “light going on and off”.
Adrian catches plenty of flak for his attitude, especially after a “concert” performance of a piece early in the film. He says he will work three more years and then do away with himself. He earns a living as a piano player in hotel lobbies, sometimes playing Chopin or Grieg, but then bangs on the piano the way we used to as kids (we called it imitating the Army once) before I started taking my piano lessons more seriously. At one point Adrian says "noise is simply unwanted sound", as if he could afford the irony; he can't.
On of brother Josh's art exhibits is based on dead mammals (including a cat) and is a bit offensive, even in the satirical context of this film!
Both brothers, however fortyish, are lithe, lean, virile, hairy, and mammalian. (The canera likes to focus on Adrian's gams.) One wonders why they find so much satisfaction in nihilism!
The movie has an excerpt of a performance from Arnold Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire”, to show what “legitimate” atonal music should sound like.
So is this movie a satire of artistic arrogance? Does it make fun of self-expression for its own sake, or of just plain attention-getting?
The film played late Saturday night to a fair crowd at Landmark E Street in downtown Washington DC. The audience did find it funny. The film is shot in Panavision Digital, in full 2.35:1, to focus more on the setting and "art" than just the characters, who "look" likeable enough. There are not that many closeups.
The website for the film is here.
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