A CRIME AGAINST ART
Rating: * (out of ****)
Cast: Anton Vidokle, Tirdad Zolghadr, Jan Verwoert
Director: Hila Peleg
Screened April 18 as part of the 2008 Hot Docs Film Festival. Also showing on Sunday at 1:15 at the Royal.

Contemporary art does itself a great disservice by referring to itself as art. I mean this not as an insult – actually, contemporary art is the first thing I head to see any time I’m in a gallery. I like its audaciousness, its bold experimentation, and its willingness to tackle taboo subjects. But how can contemporary art, which is less concerned with being aesthetically pleasurable than it is with conveying a sociopolitical message, be included under the same banner as Rembrandt, Van Gough, or even Picasso? When artists are no longer interested in the very fundamentals of art – colour, balance, proportion, etc. – wouldn’t it be wise to peg their work under some other label?

Some would suggest that art without form is a masturbatory exercise. While this is a fairly harsh dismissal (there’s considerable though put behind a lot of those canvases that your kid could’ve painted), I have at times wondered whether certain artists find more enjoyment in creating works that are opaque than works that are meaningful. Hila Peleg’s A Crime Against Art is the cinematic equivalent of contemporary art at its worst: boring, pompous, and proudly impenetrable, completely devoid of any stylistic niceties and satisfying perhaps only to those who made it.

Before going any further, I have a confession to make: a little past the halfway point, I walked out of this film. This is the first time I’ve walked out of a movie in ten years. I have exams to study for, and life’s just too short.

A Crime Against Art has a cute premise. A New York artist named Anton Vidokle, fed up with the state of the art world, has put himself, along with curator Tirdad Zolghadr, on trial for crimes against art – namely, selling out to the new bourgeoisie. (I swear to god, this movie actually uses the word “bourgeoisie” with a straight face.) The trial is filmed in the same bare-bones style you might find on a particularly slow afternoon of C-SPAN, with virtually no frills. It’s embarrassing to admit this, but I could not follow this film; the dialogue is entirely comprised of the kind of pseudo-intellectual jargon that gets used to inflate small ideas. This film is packed with people speaking so much yet saying so little.

What ideas, exactly, does this movie have? I find myself turning helplessly to Christopher McKinnon’s notes in the official Hot Docs festival guide. He reports: “The indictments are piling up. There are suggestions that the whole trial is a waste of time, or worse still a product of the accused’s puffed up vanity. There is railing against the New Bourgeoisie. The accusations continue: the trial expresses a death wish, a desire for martyrdom. The artists are guilty, guilty, guilty of a gloating kind of heroic thinking. They wish to absolved by their peers, revered by there peers, both. They have colluded with the bourgeoisie, they have eroded artistic agency, they have made impossible the creation of new and meaningful art.”

This is all intriguingly anarchic, yes, but I found it quite simply impossible to follow. The film never explains what exactly the “New Bourgeoisie” is, nor does it clearly and effectively illustrate how artists have surrendered to them, nor does it even mention very many artists by name. This movie does not even show a single example of Anton Vidokle’s work. Is it too much to ask that the filmmakers throw me a bone by placing all this nothingness in some kind of context?

I was about to say that A Crime Against Art might work better for its target audience, but what target audience could this film possibly have in mind? It completely baffled this casual patron of the arts, but I suspect even serious art enthusiasts will be bored. It feels like a home movie that Vidokle, Peleg, and the rest of the cast and crew have made for their own private amusement. Contemporary art does itself a disservice by calling itself art. A Crime Against Art does itself a disservice by calling itself a movie.