A hitman, his boss, an art dealer and a money-laundering scheme that accidentally turns the assassin into an overnight avant-garde sensation, one that forces her to play the art world against the underworld.
Banksy is a graffiti artist with a global reputation whose work can be seen on walls from post-hurricane New Orleans to the separation barrier on the Palestinian West Bank. Fiercely guarding his anonymity to avoid prosecution, Banksy has so far resisted all attempts to be captured on film. Exit Through the Gift Shop tells the incredible true story of how an eccentric French shop keeper turned documentary maker attempted to locate and befriend Banksy, only to have the artist turn the camera back on its owner.
A young woman who has just started a job at an art museum writes an email to a friend she lived with until recently. The other woman, also young, works as an artist and has just moved to a new city. A narrator reads this email, but we don't know which of the two women the voice belongs to, whether to the sender or to the receiver of the message. Neither are we aware of the details of this relationship; but what we do know is that, in addition to their interest in art, they share a concern for the difficulties of carrying out their personal and professional lives in the present. By focusing on the peripheral or hidden details of some paintings in the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, this narrator relates several stories linked to the social, economic and psychological conditions of the artists, both past and present.
Visionary artist Matthew Barney returns to cinema with this 3-part epic, a radical reinvention of Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings. In collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, Barney combines traditional modes of narrative cinema with filmed elements of performance, sculpture, and opera, reconstructing Mailer’s hypersexual story of Egyptian gods and the seven stages of reincarnation, alongside the rise and fall of the American car industry.
Loïe Fuller, stage name of Marie Louise Fuller: the American actress and dancer trained in burlesque, circuses and variety shows who, in the 1890s, signed by the Folies Bergère of Paris, became a star. She was portrayed by Toulouse-Lautrec, loved by the symbolists, the inspiration for Art Nouveau, in her shows she combined dance, spirals of fabric and light, reflected from behind or from below through the glass floor that she had created. She transformed into the "Fairy of Light", was taken up (especially in her Serpentine Dance) by Georges Méliès and Alice Guy and influenced René Clair's early films.
CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect ...
CREMASTER 2 (1999) is rendered as a gothic Western that introduces conflict into the system. On the biological level it corresponds to the phase of fetal development during which sexual division begins. In Matthew Barney's abstraction of this process, the system resists partition and tries to remain in the state of equilibrium imagined in Cremaster 1 ...
J Fever, China’s greatest “rap poet”, reinvents the origin myth of fire, in an exquisite performance with Shanghai Philharmonic in Shanghai Concert Hall, featuring composer Soulspeak and Yehaiyahan.
In 1919 an art school opened in Germany that would change the world forever. It was called the Bauhaus. A century later, its radical thinking still shapes our lives today. Bauhaus 100 is the story of Walter Gropius, architect and founder of the Bauhaus, and the teachers and students he gathered to form this influential school. Traumatised by his experiences during the Great War, and determined that technology should never again be used for destruction, Gropius decided to reinvent the way art and design were taught. At the Bauhaus, all the disciplines would come together to create the buildings of the future, and define a new way of living in the modern world.
Corpus Peccati is an unconventional and experimental film with a 1 hour and 14 minutes duration, created by filmmaker, photographer and artist Aaron Klusmann. This avant-garde film is a controversial view of sex and liberty, in a deeper understanding of the viewer, the film explores different exposures, between black and white and a red color with vertical rotations during the entire film.
Narrated by David McCullough, this program examines the infamous Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) exhibition mounted by the Nazis in Munich in 1937 and their far-reaching attacks on avant-garde art in Germany. Witness compelling footage of Nazi book burnings, and of the exhibition itself. Includes interviews with historians, art critics, and eyewitnesses to the events that dramatize this powerful story of the Nazis' assault on modern culture.
In Europe, road junctions have become public art galleries. A road trip across France, Switzerland, the Canary Islands, Greece and Germany exploring the glorious world of roundabout art.
A manufactured memory.
This 56-minute documentary on America's most controversial and unique composer manages to cover a great many aspects of Cage's work and thought. His love for mushrooms, his Zen beliefs and use of the I Ching, and basic bio details are all explained intelligently and dynamically. Black Mountain, Buckminster Fuller, Rauschenberg, Duchamp are mentioned. Yoko Ono, John Rockwell, Laurie Anderson, Richard Kostelanetz make appearances. Fascinating performance sequences include Margaret Leng-Tan performing on prepared piano, Merce Cunningham and company, and performances of Credo In Us, Water Music, and Third Construction. Demystifies the man who made music from silence, from all sounds, from life.
A rural American town suffering economically from factory closures finds an unconventional route to recovery with the help of MASS MoCA.
The epic life of a world-class artist, jammed into six minutes.
Explorations in 21st Century American Architecture Series: Ray Kappe has long been a cult figure in the architectural scene in and around Los Angeles. In 1972, he founded the influential, avant garde Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-ARC), where many of the younger-generation architects have studied or taught.
M.C. Escher is among the most intriguing of artists. In 1956 he challenged the laws of perspective with his graphic Print Gallery and his uncompleted master-piece quickly became the most puzzling enigma of modern art. Fifty years later, can mathematician Hendrik Lenstra complete it? Should he?
Art-loving comedian Joe Lycett joins artists hoping to make it onto the walls of the RA Summer Exhibition 2022, the world’s largest open-submission art contest.