The Price of Everything

Nathaniel Kahn’s The Price of Everything certainly doesn’t hold back in its skewering of a contemporary art world defined far more by financial gain and status seeking than a genuine love of beauty.

While Kahn offers no overt criticism, it’s hard not to question the sustainability of an art market that has evolved into a kind of prestige car park for vast quantities of money.

The wide ranging perspectives of painters, collectors, dealers and gallery owners makes for a thought-provoking and unexpectedly moving film.

Kahn surveys artists, dealers, auctioneers, and gallery operators to provide a synopsis of the New York art world, and is at its most interesting when profiling artists who represent differing attitudes toward the way money affects their work.

Nathaniel Kahn’s collected interviews with artists, hype-driven dealers, well-heeled collectors and art historians and visits to Sotheby’s and the Frieze Art Fair and elsewhere give us the scale of the business, the birth of competitive modern art collecting and a sense of the recent history of this winner-take-all playground of the richest of the rich.

The documentary has its memorable moments. Period footage of the now-legendary 1973 auction of contemporary art by the collector Robert Scull is riveting.

There’s something so fluid, almost nebulous, about its construction that a chasm starts to open up where you would expect to find some kind of unifying thesis.