Plinth

The brains behind Velvet Buzzsaw, Netflix’s latest feature length production intent on Skewering Art Luvvies Everywhere, seem to have taken Ellington’s warning at face value. Sail with us through the calm blue waters of Art Basel LA, auction houses and expos, studios and exquisite apartments to gawp at the beautifully dressed sharks beneath the surface.

So: meet Josephina, a latte-toting lacky with Big Dreams and Great Clothes. She’s conducting a disinterested-cum-strategic affair with taste-maker and life-ruiner, critic Morf Vanderwalt. Josephina works for Rhodora Haze, cut-throat Tough Cookie™ who has fought her way to the top of her game despite The Odds (whatever they might have been). Her gallery represents the Old Miser-Genius (Piers, played by John Malkovich), disenchanted with the content mill which success has made him. Meanwhile, a sub-plot sees his foil – Fresh Young Talent Damrish (Daveed Diggs) – squarely in Rhodora’s cross-hares, teetering on the threshold of corruptibility. For the non-initiate, bad art-world-chat can sound like a lot of proper-nouns, dropped into sentences constructed purely to showcase them. Darling, did you see So and So at So and So? It was curated by So and So – you know, that girl who worked for So and So before she came to So and So. Such is most of Velvet Buzzsaw’s dialogue. It’s meant to show us how pretentious the characters are, but it doesn’t do the film’s watch-ability any favours. If you don’t work in art, you’ll be googling lingo and job descriptions to keep up; if you do, you’ll be eye-rolling at the name drops, uncomfortable references and shop talk. When the art starts wreaking its (very literal) revenge, then, we’re not too upset to see the cast walk the plank one by one after Josephina topples the first domino in a chain. Finding a collection of paintings when a tenant in her building dies, she begins down a path which will see her roundly punished for daring to make any money from what she’s interested in.

We learn through #exposition that their artist – Ventril Dease, surely some kind of anagram; Devil Teaser? Venereal Disease? – wanted them destroyed (spooky!), but ambitious Josephina can see they’ll make her rich and famous (don’t do it!). She brings them to Rhodora and, together, the women hatch a plan to send the world Dease-mad: exploiting their contacts and the artist’s mysterious back story, they create a bubble of obsession and cash around his work. Ah, thus it ever was, eh? You won’t be surprised to hear that there’s a price to pay beyond dollars for this pseudo deal-with-the-devil, but you might not be expecting the Final Destination-esque plot twist which sees every player in the tableau picked off in turn… by the art. The specifics of its sinister logic are unclear; not everyone is killed by a Dease canvas – but some are. Not everyone is corrupted by their intoxicating charm and hypnotising powers – but some are. A delivery guy goes mad(?), crashing a truck full of creepy canvases which keep catching fire before being pulled into one, inexplicably hanging on the wall of a rest stop he screeches up outside of. One gallerist has her ARM EATEN by a sculpture (not a Dease) before dying of BLOOD LOSS in a completely different gallery. PS: The art world is so blind and corrupt, in fact, that everyone thinks her corpse is an installation until her assistant walks in on a school trip dancing in her pooled blood before lapsing into a little breakdown. Similarly, critic Morf is driven crazy – and our Josephina is eaten by graffiti, not a moment too soon.

So: art is dangerous, in Velvet Buzzsaw – on multiple (conflicting) planes at once. On the one hand, it poses a moral threat. From the swishy, mercenary vacuity of dealers, assistants and writers, we learn that art is dangerous because it will make a monster of you – that someone who got into the game for love of Truth, Beauty Etc Etc will emerge a money-grabbing husk of the pure idealist they started out. The film’s first half hour or so set us up our stable of stock characters, each illustrating a different way in which art both attracts and produces awful people, before delivering their comeuppance in its second movement. Even the clumsiest attempt at nuance goes out the window with this crescendo: now, art is dangerous because it’s haunted and/or heavy. Objects themselves enact violence upon the mind, and then the body. Satire, I know, I know… but...

At the heart of all this (nonsense) is the specious categorisation of art as a different kind of object, one embodying qualities that its deserving victims have lost the ability to see. Dease’s paintings are possessed, but it’s this culty belief in a kind of animism/false idol narrative we find at the heart of Velvet Buzzsaw and its wider comment on the art world. I know I’m writing from inside the sausage factory, but I have no problem saying clearly that there are many awful things, and terrible people, in the art world – as with any industry. Some of our badness is unique (money + beauty does strange things to people, and we do a good line in pseudo-intellectualising about what is often, at heart, nothing more sophisticated than an investment), while other failings are down to garden-variety human fallibility (see: greed, laziness, ruthless ambition, cynicism). It’s not an instinct to defend my bread and butter, but rather a kind of involuntary snorting at the adolescent epiphany – that people make careers in art rather than just, I don’t know, holding religious services in its honour – which is getting me.

Simmering beneath the surface tension of Velvet Buzzsaw is an indignant gotcha: maybe nothing worse than puerile, nothing better than facetious. Everyone looks great, in their own gruesome ways (the film’s wardrobe department is by far its star) and I guess that’s part of the heavy-handed symbolism teaching us about surface appeal vs integrity. What’s less slick is the film’s grasp on what art is and isn’t for; what art can and can’t do. Velvet Buzzsaw’s box ticking and name dropping is exhausting, but it’s there to show how well informed the writing is; how thoroughly researched, and therefore reliable, the jumping-off point for its satire is. All the googling in the world, though, can’t teach you the ostensible opposite of art-world doctrine – magic is illusion; an objet is an object; an artist is a human; a game’s a game. Bad people are everywhere: you don’t need a haunted sculpture to bite their arm off to realise that.

By Emily Watkins.