The Price of Everything (2018)

(On Cable TV, May 2020) You would think that having watched another feature-length documentary about the modern art world (Blurred Lines: Inside the Art World) two weeks earlier would have been an issue in appreciating the similarly-themed The Price of Everything to its full value. But no—it speaks to the insanity of the modern art market that there is more than enough space for two, three or even more fascinating documentaries about it. This one takes a gently confrontational approach in interviewing artists about what they think of the bull run on their artwork, then goes on to show what’s happening at auctions with art critics, curators and collectors. The field’s remarkable absurdity is highlighted by the contrast offered between the artists (most of them far humbler than you’d think) and the ludicrous amounts of money thrown at one auction after another. (In one of the film’s best moments, it gets a live aghast reaction from an artist being shown how her art was essentially “flipped” in speculation.) Director Nathaniel Kahn gets access to two opposite artistic heavy hitters—corporate Koons, unpolished Poons—and uses their work as a springboard to examine the question of expensive art, bought for millions and stored away from the public, only reappearing to be sold as investments at higher prices, safely out of reach of all museums. Other talking heads span the spectrum from collectors, salespeople (oops; “gallery representatives”), and commentators. There are some intriguing juxtapositions in the way The Price of Everything’s material is presented, perhaps none as hard-hitting as the end-credit sequence in which art is taken down from a gallery wall, driven to an off-Manhattan storage facility and unceremoniously stored in an anonymous high-security storage locker. Completely fascinating—I have a feeling I could line up a day’s worth of modern art documentaries, and they would all be great.