By Laura Medina
The Writer/Director, Dan Gilroy.
If "The Player" satirizes style over substance, the pompous and the pretentious gloss of the entertainment industry, it sets the template for the 21st century of the veneer of posh glossing over another multi-billion dollar industry-the art world in "Velvet Buzzsaw."
If you like dark comedy and cautionary tales taking down the pompous and pretentious, then "Velvet Buzzsaw" is for you.
Titled after an all-girl punk rock band and a tattoo worn by an ex-punk who grew up into an art dealer to make a living, (Renee Russo), "Velvet Buzzsaw" is a satirical-horror Faustian tale on the insular world of art dealers, multi-billion dollar art as trophies and investments, and turning artists into celebrities and a deranged serial killer whose hobby was painting cursed, haunted paintings, using his victims' body tissue, fluids, and blood as paint. Whomever possesses them is cursed. This is where the tale of art as commodity, not as expression or commentary or representation, takes a murderous turn.
Of course, it makes fun of the art world's exceptionally well-dressed patrons, buyers, and dealers. They can't help being stylistos, fashionistas, and culturati. It's a culture where they literally wear their arts on their sleeves.
Real LA Art Show attendees, real fashionistas.
PHOTO LA where art is a commodity and a trend, mermaids.
This is why last year's LA Art Show was a convenient stand-in for Art Basel Miami. LA Art Show, Art Basel Miami, and PHOTO LA are interchangeable localities of a status-level, high-end, highly cultivated stratosphere of art advisors, art critics, art dealers, (They're like birds. They flock together) and where established artists print out copies of their paintings since their prints are cheaper than their original paintings. This is where art becomes bread and butter commodity. Best exemplified by John Malkovich's Pier, the established wise sage who spotted those demons in those deranged paintings, right away.
These psychological haunted, curse dark paintings by the serial-killer artist, Vetril Dease, makes "Velvet Buzzsaw" into today's 21st century's "Night Gallery," the twisted, more sinister version of "The Twilight Zone."
The movie also mocks the instant superficiality and popularity/advertisement of social media where a murder was mistaken as an art installation and posted on Instagram. A witty commentary on how art is dependent on social media.
If you like eye candy, David Hockney gloss, and mocking shallow, superficial, contradictory intellectuals who are just as horny, lustful, and driven with base needs as mere mortals, then "Velvet Buzzsaw" is the gourmet horror eye candy for you.
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