If you start to feel that pressure from inside to continue making things that will sell, that will infect your art and completely screw you up. Paula, his wife, was completely essential. The Price of Everything takes its title from Oscar Wilde’s quip that ‘nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.’ Ironically, this film is so hypnotized by price that it leaves little room to say much of value about value. I do think he and Gael feel their collection is a profound expression of themselves. This programme is not currently available on BBC iPlayer, Thomas Hengelbrock, Freiburger Barockorchester. It’s very painful. Featuring collectors, dealers, auctioneers and a rich range of artists, including market darlings George Condo, Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, The Price of Everything examines the role of art and artistic passion in today’s money-driven, consumer-based society. I grew up in a world where classical art was the pinnacle. It’s complex. Financial success should be a good thing for an artist, because it gives you the freedom to continue to do your work. Time is what it takes. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 1/1/20) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 1/1/20) and Your California Privacy Rights. Those who see when they are shown, and those who will never see. It’s really fun to try to get a hold of that slippery fish, and to see it from lots of different vantage points.”, The Price of Everything director Nathaniel Kahn. To find a person as philosophical and brilliant and surprising as Larry was a filmmaker’s dream. Now we take it as a given, though the average layperson may be less cognizant of the extent to which the international billionaire class uses contemporary art as an asset allocation much like real estate or stocks—and the toll that takes on the ability of museums to compete at auction. Nathaniel Kahn's enthralling documentary is about how the art world got taken over by money, but it's no screed. Museums are not a major focus of the film. I think it’s a very important thing to remember that for artists, time isn’t money. Time is just time. But if you’re struggling to be an artist in this super-monetized moment, you’re constantly confronted with this idea that success can be measured in dollars and cents, which ultimately in art it cannot. But one of the things that was interesting for me in filming him is, Stefan was not particularly, in the beginning, interested in sharing much about himself. But it’s the kind of thing you can’t get a hold of, this slippery fish that’s always getting away from you. The Price of Everything review – elusive portrait of art-world prestige 3 / 5 stars 3 out of 5 stars. I began by interviewing some of the other artists, the collectors, the auction-house people. To see how certain artists are being picked up and become darlings of the system, that also has a real flip side to it: It can get in your head. I think this is part of what art is constantly doing: breaking down our biases, the way we were brought up. If Kahn is critical, it is of something bigger than any one person: the forward march of capitalism, the relentlessness of the profit motive, and the failure to insulate artists from its pressures. If you’re using the market to build a collection, to build value, I think that’s going to change. It’s not always like that. Each artist has his own process. But I certainly have an inner Larry Poons. But she’s also a great lover and appreciator of art. He said, all right, why don’t you come up to my studio upstate. When I started making the film, there was a lot of contemporary art that I really just didn’t respond to. Having grown up in a family of artists, I’ve seen from an early age the fraught relationship between art and money. Now I love it. A few figures emerge as centers of gravity: Sotheby’s gimlet-eyed chairman of fine art, Amy Cappellazzo, who spends much of the film putting together a massive auction of a private collection; the aforementioned Edlis, a charismatic and savvy nonagenarian who stuffs his apartment in Chicago’s John Hancock Center with oodles of (often challenging) blue-chip art; Njideka Akunyili Crosby, a young Nigerian artist living and working in Los Angeles, whose deeply personal, painstakingly figurative paintings have begun to command steep prices at auction; and perhaps most compellingly, grizzled veteran painter Larry Poons, a peer of Rauschenberg and Johns who turned away from his commercially successful, Leo Castelli–represented ’60s Op Art dot paintings toward more expressive abstractions, reinventing himself to the detriment of his own market (if you’re familiar with My Architect, Kahn’s sensitive, searching 2003 documentary portrait of his late father, architect Louis Kahn, it’s easy to find traces of the latter in Poons). A couple of weeks ago, a 2006 painting by elusive street artist Banksy went up for auction at Sotheby’s in London and sold for a record-making $1.4 million. My Architect was this breakthrough moment for you. Ad Choices. One thing that unified everyone in the film, whether they make, buy, or sell art, is that they are obsessed with it. I think the film invites the comparison between, say, that and the sort of matter-of-fact way someone like George Condo works: you film him making a huge painting without breaking a sweat over the course of a single morning. It was the feeling of walking into a sanctuary of art. I’m sure there is stuff I’m never seeing, not because it’s not good but because I haven’t spent enough time with it or I can’t grasp it. The new tax code just eliminated the 1031 exchange benefit for art (meaning one can no longer sell art and use the proceeds to buy new art, tax free). The Price of Everything. Empires rise and empires fall, people have their day and then they’re gone. I happen to love that, because it undercuts this sense that all art needs to be this kind of spilling of one’s guts and of struggle and of terror and tearing your hair out. So really looking at art as an asset class, that meant we needed to look at the auction houses and at the individuals using it that way. Featuring collectors, dealers, auctioneers and a rich range of artists, from current market darlings Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter and Njideka Akunyili Crosby to one-time art star Larry Poons, the film exposes deep contradictions as it holds a mirror up to the values of the modern era, coaxing out the dynamics at play in pricing the priceless. 3.5 stars That comes out in an interesting way in the case of Stefan Edlis, the great collector. Vogue may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Publisher: Allen Lane. This is a broader canvas, with multiple characters triangulating many points of view, but I think it’s the same basic obsession: which is that art requires freedom. I don’t have faith in a lot of what’s going on now. She said, I’ll talk to Larry about it. Money confers an implicit value on things in a way that’s deceptive and very often wrong. (To be fair: It seems unlikely that Banksy wouldn’t have predicted as much.). It examines the role of art and artistic passion in today’s money-driven, consumer-based society — where everything can be bought and sold. About halfway through The Price of Everything, director Nathaniel Kahn’s new documentary about the vicissitudes of the contemporary art market, mega-collector Stefan Edlis gives the filmmaker his title: “There’s a lot of people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing,” quips Edlis in his thick Austrian accent, summing up the dichotomy at the heart of Kahn’s project. Art collector Stefan Edlis in front of artist Urs Fischer’s Dried collage and Untitled (Candle) sculpture. Stefan knows what he likes. We’re always thinking: Well, time is money, and if someone can do a painting so quickly, well, gee, that sounds like a pretty easy way to make a living. It’s a construct that works really well for people who deal in financial worlds, but it’s actually threatening to take over our way of seeing everything. I knew that I needed somebody who really had had this very specific experience in the art market, who had early success and then for whatever particular reason, the spotlight shone away from them for a while but they continued to make work. Release Calendar DVD & Blu-ray Releases Top Rated Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Showtimes & Tickets In Theaters Coming Soon Coming Soon Movie News India Movie Spotlight. Clips of that event, including one of a famous altercation between a stricken-looking Rauschenberg and a bemused Scull, appear in Kahn’s film as a reminder of a quainter time when auctioning work by living artists still seemed downright unseemly. “I hope that the film presents something like a kaleidoscope. TV-14 | 1 hr 39 min | 2018 | 5.1 | HD. That reality hovers over the film, as does dealer Gavin Brown’s doomsday prognosticating about the future of the art-world bubble (“we’re careening toward some edge, some end”). I was very anxious going into the studio. Exploring the labyrinth of the contemporary art world, The Price of Everything examines the role of art and artistic passion in today’s money-driven, consumer-based society. I think once again, this is where the connection between art and money needs to be broken. Featuring collectors, dealers, auctioneers and a rich range of artists, including current … Menu. The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. I don’t know the answer to that. ( 2018-01-19) (Sundance Film Festival) Running time. I’ve heard this from dealers and from artists, that he’s very good at coming into a room and picking the best piece. He’d actually seen My Architect, which made a difference. But as always, art is showing us who we are. He was not in the beginning. Read about our approach to external linking. Banksy soon posted a video on Instagram, in which he explained that he had built a remote-operated shredder into his frame as a backstop in the event that the piece ever went up at auction. Do you buy her theory? Two-part documentary which deals with two of the deepest questions there are - what is everything, and what is nothing? To what degree were you already familiar with his work? To create art you have to be able to explore what is deepest in yourself, and you have to be able to be as free as possible of the controls that a financial system places upon you. So he has qualities of the connoisseur. Blasé people do not inspire a great deal of interest for the filmmaker or for me as a person. Now we’re back to Larry, back to money. It meanders from character to character, in the process posing big questions: Is there a way to conceive of value outside of how much things cost? By including some of my questions, we are constantly reminded there’s someone who wants to know about what’s going on, and who knows less about … He was able to share something that I don’t think in 50 hours of interviewing we would have gotten to without the piece of art. I don’t want to sound Pollyannaish about this, because I think the actual moment we’re living in right now, in which art is being used as an asset class, is profoundly concerning. What's on TV & Streaming What's on TV & Streaming Top … He understood where I was coming from. Do you think that’s true of Stefan, too? THE PRICE OF EVERYTHING (2018) ... auction house executives and critics reflect on the value of art in the age of consumerism, we see that the issue is rarely black and white. To be honest, I was not familiar. Quesnay pointed to agriculture because how can a person really create something? But a film needs a soul. _ Usa elections Timings (where shown) are from the start of the programme in hours and minutes, Am Abend Aber Desselbigen Sabbats, Bwv 42 (Cantata): Sinfonia. I guess that puts me in the category of: I was shown and I could see it. Then I had the shocking experience of going into museums that had significant collections and saying, oh, wow, I recognize that painting, I know that painter; this one was in love with that one, they lived together, oh I get it. The smartest thing about the documentary The Price of Everything, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, is that it doesn’t try to pose definitive answers to these questions. Even Koons, the obvious whipping boy, whose work, as Nemerov disdainfully puts it, “wishes to define life as a glittering compromise with commerce,” gets evenhanded treatment. Author: Mariana Mazzucato . She gives a history of how various jobs and commodities were valued in the past, discussing the earliest concepts of economic value as defined by the physiocrats and moving through the theories of history's most prominent economists, including Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Marshall, Samualson and Pigou. She absolutely loves selling it, and she’s really good at it. Mission, values and public purposes The Royal Charter states that the BBC’s object is “the fulfilment of its Mission and the promotion of its Public Purposes” There are definitely connections. It will never be as native to me as Bach. 19 January 2018. Kahn’s film airs on HBO in November but first will premiere in select theaters this Friday, nearly 45 years to the day after the notorious Scull auction, widely regarded as the event that marked the birth of the contemporary art bubble as we know it (Robert Scull was a taxi fleet owner who scooped up pieces by nobodies like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and flipped them at then-unheard-of prices a decade or so later). I worry greatly about where all this commoditization of everything leads. I thought his other fictional attempts to teach economics were decent, but in my opinion this one represents a real step up. I needed a person who had really suffered through this. I loved Jackson Pollock, always liked De Kooning. We talked for maybe three hours outside, and I was thinking, Oh, my God, this is so incredible. See the First Trailer for ‘The Price of Everything,’ HBO’s New Documentary About the High-Flying Art Market By Taylor Dafoe , Aug 31, 2018 sign up to our daily newsletter I would go in and fixate on a little detail. “I’m always on the side of artists,” Kahn tells me by phone, laughing. Were you afraid the new work was going to be uninspired? Only the planet can do that and merchants are … Perhaps because they’re being priced out of the contemporary art market? As the auctioneer gaveled in the transaction, a whirring sound distracted the crowd, who watched as the painting, suddenly three times more valuable than estimates predicted, slipped from its frame, fed through a mechanism hidden inside, and emerged as a dozen or so dangling ribbons of canvas. Because it’s the voice of being a human being, and that, in the end, is not something that money is going to control. The fact that art can be used this way should wake you up. Painter Larry Poons walking to his studio. 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