The Price of Everything
With Nathaniel Kahn and Jennifer Blei Stockman
Following the screening, director Nathaniel Kahn and producer Jennifer Stockman will join in conversation with Bill Arning, director of Contemporary Art Museum Houston, and Jessica Phifer, Associate Vice President and Senior Account Manager of the Southwest Region for Christie's Auction House.
Paintings by Basquiat and Gerhard Richter sell at auction for tens of millions of dollars; a multi-story inflatable ballerina by Jeff Koons dwarfs visitors at Rockefeller Center; Maurizio Cattelan’s gold plated toilet is installed in the Guggenheim Museum for all to see and use. Today, art is a spectacle, big bucks and front-page news. As a society, we have become less concerned with the aesthetic and social values of art, and more concerned with brand names and the business of it all. Many feel that art has become a pawn of the ultra-rich—an exclusive investment class with perks and loopholes out of reach to the average citizen— who, as collectors, flip works at auction and squirrel away their trophies in high end security warehouses.
This documentary by Nathaniel Kahn, son of the famed architect Louis Kahn, demystifies the rarefied world of contemporary art in a dynamic and entertaining way. With unprecedented access to artists, dealers, collectors and auction houses, it takes us deep into a hidden world where nothing is what it seems. Ultimately, the film re-affirms the transcendent power of art itself and the deep need we have for it in our lives.
| Country, Year | United States, 2018 |
|---|---|
| Director | Nathaniel Kahn |
| Cast | WITH LARRY POONS, MARY BOONE, JEFF KOONS, GERHARD RICHTER, BARBARA ROSE, JERRY SALTZ, NJIDEKA AKUNYILI CROSBY, JEFFREY DEITCH |
| Producer | Jennifer Blei Stockman |
| Language | English |
| Runtime | 98 MINS, 00 SECS |
| Genre | Documentary |
| Subject | Fine Art |
| Event Type | Film |
Special Guests
Nathaniel Kahn
Growing up In a family of creative people, Nathaniel Kahn saw firsthand how difficult it is to live life as an artist. An award-winning filmmaker in his own right, Kahn is perhaps best known for his documentary My Architect, about his father, Louis I. Kahn, which was nominated for an Academy Award© in 2003 as well as being nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards and an Emmy. Kahn also won the 2004 Directors Guild of America award for outstanding direction of a documentary. His short films include the Oscar and Emmy nominated Two Hands (2006), about the internationally celebrated pianist Leon Fleisher. Kahn has also made several films on science including Telescope (2015) and Dark Side of the Sun (2016) for Discovery. He is currently working on a film about NASA’s new Webb Telescope and the search for life in the universe, as well as a feature screenplay, which he will direct.
Jennifer Blei Stockman
Jennifer Blei Stockman is a principal in Hot & Sunny Productions, formed to provide content about artists and the art world for film and television. She worked as an executive for over 30 years in the business world while avidly collecting contemporary art. She has been President of the Guggenheim Museum since 2005, with museums in New York, Bilbao, Venice, and a project in Abu Dhabi. Blei Stockman also has served on museum committees at MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Aspen Art Museum. She is a producer of Love, Cecil a documentary by Lisa Immordino Vreeland that premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and was screened at HCAF2017.