The grass is always greener… why film directors buy art, and artists want to direct
Once you’ve ‘arrived,’ once you’ve battled through the terrible funnel of Hollywood – so narrow it makes the Spartan-defended mountain pass of 300 seem like an endless open savannah – once you’ve trodden tooth and claw on the shoulders of others, shielding their slashes with your shield of higher belief, once you’ve made a film as a director or producer by marshalling the steely resolve and girded limbs of a literal army – from the craft services agonizing over chicken or beef options, the foley artists pioneering radical new developments in wire-strumming, the production assistants destined for some non-industry future purgatory with nothing more than (maybe) a good C-list anecdote when they decamp to the cheaper rents of Oregon, the CG artists who’ve developed carpal tunnel before most of them can grow whiskers – once you’re king of the world, what do you do to show you’ve arrived?
You buy some art, of course.
You buy something that was made, more often than not, by one person. In isolation. Something definitely not the result of a collaboration. I’m not talking about the Damien Hirsts or Jeff Koons here; artists in the modern mould who delegate their grand ideas to a production team of artisans in a process analogous to the Hollywood model; I’m talking about those souls who sit alone in a studio, make something via either the specific application of pigment-daubs on canvas or the three-dimensional manipulation of base materials.
And now you’ve arrived, you buy this art for a lot of money, at a markup (slang for “fiscal multiplier of base cost to retail”) so vast in relation to the amount of personnel involved (one) that it mocks and beggars the efforts of you and your Hollywood armies. As the “producer/director/not a model,” this irony must stab at you, Ahab-like, as you sit in your yoga sweats on the floor of your John Lautner home. You’ve conquered the world, driven the slack-jawed lemmings into multiplexes across the blue and red states, multiplied your ‘quote’ (basic fee structure) higher than a Hollywood moth cracked out on the Street of the Stars, and yet all your gifts – both Kaballistic and Hubbardian – cannot hope to match the perverse monetary multiplier of this… individual, squatting in his ivory tower.
And that’s why you buy the art: because it makes no bloody sense in relation to the fiscal empirics of your own production world, and when you’ve eradicated sense and all you have is disposable income, you surely want to spend it on something vastly overinflated because… it says you have values. Sure, you give to the charities, and sit through those endless events for giant pandas and those sad stoical mastectomy cases, but there’s nothing quite like blowing some dosh on a one-off to demonstrate one’s delicate perception of things that hover above the commonweal.
The Hollywood Hills are full of homes that are essentially art galleries with some bedrooms, an adopted African infant (optional), and an infinity pool attached.
It’s a well know fact that director Michael Bay has had an underground bunker built, modeled on James Bond set designer Ken Adams’ drawings of an extinct volcano, where Roy Lichtenstein sits, trapped behind shark-filled moats, endlessly filling reinforced concrete walls with onomatopoeic sequels to Whaam! (1963) such as Kblaam! Thwip! B-tok! And Krakablam… Rumble… Pow!
It’s a well known fact that Steve Martin isn’t actually remotely funny in person, and relies on his art collection to fill in the awkward silences. When visitors from Texas (potential hedge fund investors in Martin’s back catalogue of endlessly innovative feature remakes of ‘50s and ‘60s inventory, started with comedic classics such as Bilko and The Pink Panther, and currently slated to develop such gems as Duck and Cover – the Musical!) ask him to do the “I’m in the phonebook now” schtick, guests have testified that Martin, sternocleoidomastoids clenched, defaults to whipping out his Diebenkorns and talking about the plein air movement in a dull monotone that turns the gazpacho frigid.
It’s a well known fact that Jack Nicholson only makes movies now so he can hoover up the remaining twentieth century visual art classics and have them interred on his Mulholland estate by a cadre of minimum-wage Cu Chi tunnelers so that only he can ever enjoy them again (leaving us peons with such manifold mass cultural delights as The Bucket List to occupy our higher sensibilities in the vacuum that Jack leaves us…). And that he’s waiting for Ed Ruscha to die, so he can buy his bones and skullfuck him, LBJ to Jack Kennedy-style, like he does nightly to Picasso (“Conceptual art? Cubism? You can’t handle the truth!”).
Whilst this might seem to be an iniquitous relationship between the tribes of pop culture and high art, lets us never forget that these spinwheeling creatives are locked forevermore into a symbiotic relationship (imagine a pilot fish picking the excess flesh from the teeth of a mako shark); a kind of push-me-pull-you in which visual artists profit by making elite products available that act as badges of taste for film people; thereby helping assuage filmmaker’s fever dreams of trying to square the circle between their higher aspirations of sequestered cultural acceptance with a basic impulse to buy the ticket by milking the base tastes of the shabbiest proletarian teat.
The mutual contract dynamic between film people and visual artists is that the former can buy the latter (”I own you. You’re my bitch. I control the horizontal.”) and that the latter can sell to the former and make them feel privileged (”You like me. You really like me. Terms are 30 days. I control the vertical.”) but where it gets weird is when artists and filmmakers, drunk on their respective achievements, decide to dip their toes in the other’s waters, reverse the electrodes in the body politic and command cultural energies to flow uphill.
It’s an entirely understandable impulse. But…
Like David Bowie acting: like Joseph Beuys releasing a pop single, like Senator John McCain trying to be our friend; there are certain lines that can only be crossed under the shadow of potential catastrophic failure and a misreading of signs.
In terms of filmmakers who want to become artists, the results have been thankfully contained to the occasional Malibu bake sale or vanity gallery: the paintings of Whoopie and Busey, lotteried off to contribute to a rainforest canopy project, bought and stored in the ‘special’ section of the home/art gallery (the basement). Note: this observation does not apply to the paintings of David Lynch or the photographs of Jeff Bridges, both of whom would still be cool if they were selling cigarettes at a Right To Life convention…
But in terms of artists who want to become filmmakers, it’s a different ball game when they crave to prove themselves in the crucible of popular culture. Mistaking their taste – reinforced by louche yes people and hangers-on in the clubs of Manhattan and Soho London – as being somewhat more polyvalent than it might actually be, they send their efforts to totter out, embarrassed and humiliated, giggling like an ingenue into the cold klieg lights of mass culture.
Forgetting – for convenience’s sake - the estimable worth of Julian Schnabel’s entirely wonderful and humbling body of film work, there are plenty of offenders: Matthew Barney and Bjork’s Drawing Restraint 9 (2006): Bono’s Million Dollar Hotel and Ethan Hawke’s Chelsea Walls (two even more curious cases of filmmakers pretending to be artists pretending to be filmmakers); but, to kick the deadest of dogs, let’s settle for Robert Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic (and who knew that Schnabel would turn out to be far far cooler than Longo? All of those generic dancing figures should surely have trumped that messy crockery Euro-shit…). A film so mesmerizingly stupid, so ill-conceived, so inept on a cosmic level that the best thing you can say about it is… that the production design sucked. Which is the one thing you would think a fledgling artist turned director should be able to guarantee.
The grass may be greener, “my friends” (to quote our friend the Senator again); but here be monsters… Monsters of hubris, wherein what should have been home video projects were attended upon by phalanxes of professional technicians. Things that stink even worse than a bad Michael Gondry flick. Monsters of delusional passion; birthed and thankfully snuffed out in a handful of arthouse movie theaters and film festivals before they could put their little claw hand on our shoulder…
In short: there’s a goddamned reason Michael Bay gets paid enough to collect Roy Lichtenstein. People should draw a line in the sand, goddamnit it…