The Game of Art

It's film festival time here in Vancouver and we were lucky enough to get in a film on friday night called The Great Contemporary Art Bubble. Ben Lewis, the British Journalist and Art critic turned film maker, interviewed people within the inner core of the Contemporary Art scene to understand the false markets that were being created during Art Auctions. In exposing the business of buying and selling high end Contemporary Art, it became clear that it was not only the galleries and collectors driving up art prices in order to over-value their own collections, but that the artist at the top were just as entrenched in the game as everyone else. They would often over-saturate the market by making multiples of work, so the collector who had bought the painting for $3 million previously would start bidding to raise the price to $10 million at auction in order to raise the value of their other work. Galleries, collectors and artists seemed in cahoots, driving up prices in the high millions for work that .
This film describes a world that seems so far removed from the average existence of many artists. Historically most artists never see such an amount of money that their work could generate during their life-time. It really seemed like a big boys club throughout the entire film: not one female artist was mentioned with a large price tag involved and most of the collectors and gallery owners mentioned were also men. I can appreciate the work of the exclusive list of high rolling art stars as their work has made an impact on the art world at large, but is paint on canvas with some butterflies pasted on it really worth $14 million dollars?

The Windmill

Something I've wanted to do for a while was pull old Super8 film from my childhood onto my computer. My parents had been able to transfer some of the Super8 footage onto a VCR tape a few years ago, but whoever worked on it mixed up all the images and clipped them off in odd spots.
The fragmentation of my childhood on film is somewhat like my memory of these early days. There are clips missing, it's often without sound, and the timeline of events gets lost in the foggyness of my memory. However, there is something so lovely about these scenes of the Windmill from the Steinbach Museum and Historical site. The awkwardness of my dad's filming techniques make it so nostalgic and 'homemade', and yet the scene of my sister, myself and a little boy watching the arms of the Windmill go past us is a scene I want to see over and over again. I watched this with different music to it, but due to copyright I decided it was best to leave it without sound for now. Anyways, it's a work in progress, but I wanted to share it nonetheless.