Cultured Magazine

were exposed to what we see and experience in the art world. We take for granted meeting famous artists in their studios, talking to brilliant curators about collection strategies, visiting the homes of major private collectors around the world. These opportunities are a rare privilege, and one of our objectives was to share them with an audience who might never set foot in a museum or an artist studio. We wanted the film to be interesting and engage audiences of all demographics. SR: You have an incredibly diverse group of artists in the film. How did you decide who to include? JS: We knew we needed artists who had different career trajectories and interesting personal stories. We needed dealers, experts from the auction world, art critics and people from the museum world. The challenge was to find people who would open up their heart and soul in front of the camera, which is not easy, plus one never knows how someone is actually going to come across on screen. DW: I remember when the director Nathaniel Kahn came back from his interview with Larry Poons upstate and exclaimed "We have a film!" Early on we made a decision to focus as much as possible on the artists. We also always knew we wanted to look at when the market changed and when the commoditization of art became a thing. We discussed many points of departure, and we ended up deciding on the Scull auction because there seemed to be a consensus on that being a pivotal moment in contemporary art history. We wanted to show that there wasn't a randomness to all of it. It's rooted in something specific—or a confluence of events. JS: It was important to show a range of artists. Our talented archivist Judy Aley was able to find awesome footage of dozens of artists painting, sculpting, photographing, going back to the '60s and through the present. Edward Dolman, who's now the chair of Phillips auction house, talks about the differences between the '60s and the international art world that exists today. There's a wonderful scene in the film that puts this archival footage together, with Dolman's narrative accompanied by David Bowie's song "Fashion." DW: That sequence alludes to the fact that when you look at artists today, you wonder who's going to be around 20, 30, 40 years from now. Who's going to be relevant and why? I was in Los Angeles last week and someone used Jacob Kassay as an adjective. Can you imagine for a young artist what that would be like? SR: What does commoditization actually mean for the art and the artists? DW: That's a question of what you value and why—and our view might be slightly different than other people's views. There's a line at the beginning of the film where Paul Schimmel states that there would be no golden age without gold— and if there weren't hundreds of more people buying art, there wouldn't be thousands of more artists making art. He concludes by stating that bubbles COURTESY OF HBO 144 culturedmag.com

• Cover