I Am a Serious Artist: Contemporary Artists in Contemporary Hollywood

If Art Basel at Miami Beach (AB@MB) wanted to make a movie, they were relieved of the drudgery of doing so when Velvet Buzzsaw (2019) hit Netflix. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a pathetically cynical art critic, swanning around contemporary galleries in Los Angeles. He encounters the “undiscovered” paintings of a deceased artist named Vetril Dease. (They are all rote gothic narratives: think German artist Jörg Immendorf meets Iron Maiden’s Eddie the Head done à la Lucien Freud.) Dease has used human blood mixed with paint, so anyone who buys or trades in these paintings dies a gory death. The film’s marketing tags it a “camp horror” — and if you believe that, you must be Ken Russell. Velvet Buzzsaw is simultaneously a perfect snapshot of AB@MB’s Floridian hustle that suckers le dumb riche into buying “crapceptual art” (think Joseph Kosuth at a Costco stall at Coachella), and a film that performs the same hustle to a streaming audience who can be suckered into believing that this is how the “art world” operates.