Who Gets to Call It Art? | DVD Review

WHO GETS TO CALL IT ART? drops you right into the middle of the electric liveliness of the 1960’s New York art scene. The pace is quick, the characters are eccentric and the score is jazzed and pulsing. Of course, the pace has slowed considerably as the artists that influenced and molded the scene then are now being interviewed in their quiet studios with their coffees in hand and their hair thinned and silver. They may have slowed but their smiles are still beaming as they were once a part of a movement that was bigger than they were, that swallowed them up and carried them along before it laid them down gently in the pages of the art history books of the future.

Director Peter Rosen struggled at first with how to string together the many artists from the period that impacted him without his documentary coming across like a random sampling of biographies. The answer, find the epicenter of that scene, the point all the influential artists inevitably came into contact with at one point. In this case, it isn’t a bar or a style but a man. This man is not an artist himself but an aesthete. His name is Henry Geldzahler, the man who would eventually come to be the curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Henry was the ultimate admirer that began by stroking the egos of the artists he met but finished by influencing the way they saw their own pieces. He was a man with a truly good eye who saw life in art and brought that life back to the museum, which before his famously controversial exhibit of contemporary American artists, showed nothing but what he described as dead art.

The DVD boasts some fairly weak extras that the critical art crowd will not stand for. There are a number of interviews with artists as diverse as John Chamberlain and Jasper Johns but like most things that are cut from the final print, there was good reason to. The interviews are flat and reveal nothing of interest. The next offering is a Q&A with the director and a couple of the artist s who were on hand for the New York premiere screening. This is particularly hard to endure as it is audio only. You don’t even get to look at pretty art stills while you listen to the host of the Q&A practically beg the audience to ask a question. What may be the most interesting special feature is a “Happening”. Imagine early performance art caught on film. This particular happening is called “Fotodeath” and features an appearance by Geldzahler. Its entirely pretentious but I guess noteworthy if you’re a collector.

WHO GETS TO CALL IT ART? seems to state that Henry Geldzahler is the answer to the question. I have another answer and that is me. I get to call it art. A) because I am the film critic and B) because I say so. And as the man who gets to call it art, I enjoyed this film but I won’t go so far as to call this film art. It is a film about art and it is interesting enough but it is not art unto itself.

Movie rating – 3

Disc Rating – 2.5