Blurred Lines: Inside the Art World (2017)

(On TV, April 2020) I don’t know a lot about art, but I have vivid memories of reading Don Thompson’s The 12 Million Dollars Stuffed Shark and look at that—he’s one of the several experts interviewed by director Barry Avrich in Blurred Lines: Inside the Art World. It’s a documentary that gives us a snappy but fascinating 94-minute overview of the modern art world, with a heavy emphasis on the eye-watering prices that some of the best-known artists fetch. You can draw a fairly clear line between the money people and the art people throughout the film as it studies various components of that universe. The money people shrug and consider art as possession (although they acknowledge that regulating the market is practically impossible when every piece has its own distinctive history), while the artistic people are a bit embarrassed by the amount of attention that the money brings to the field. Still, there are tons of great shots here, an overview of many major players in the field and a timeline of significant events in the past few years. Blurred Lines doesn’t package everything in a transcendent story (Avrich’s subsequent Made You Look is better as a visual arts documentary) but it’s a rather good overview of the subject—frankly, I was disappointed that it had to end, because I probably could have enjoyed 15–30 minutes of it.