Roxie Theater (Venue Partner)
3117 16th St
415.863.1087
This event has passed.
-
Art Bubble
- When
-
Jan 21, 2010 – Jan 27, 2010
Mondays–Wednesdays (6:30pm)
Thursdays (7pm)
Fridays–Sundays (6:30pm)
- Where
-
- Price
-
$9.75 General, $5 Seniors/Children, $6 Weekend Matinees, $5 Mondays!
- Links
"Remember when the global economy was booming? The price of everything was doubling. Oil hit $150 a barrel. There were 1,000 billionaires on the planet, and rising. World markets were full of bubbles, but one bubble was bigger and bubblier than all the rest--contemporary art. The last five years witnessed an unprecedented craze for that commodity, with works selling for insane prices, far exceeding their auction house estimates--$73 million for Rothko, $86 million for Bacon. While the rest of the economy began to falter in late 2007, the contemporary art bubble continued, improbably, to inflate, climaxing with Damien Hirst's unprecedented auction at Sotheby's in London that sold 111 million pounds worth of preserved animal corpses on the day of the Lehman Brothers collapse.
Art critic and filmmaker Ben Lewis spent a year following the ins and outs of the booming contemporary art market, from its heady peak in 2008 to its inevitable crash in 2009. In this fascinating, revealing and controversial eyewitness journey deep inside the art world, the exuberant Lewis visits auction houses, art fairs (including Basel) and the homes of billionaires around the world, searching for the reasons behind the greatest rise in financial value in art history. Traveling the globe, he interviews contemporary art stars, leading dealers, art collectors and market analysts, discovering an extraordinary world of secretive deals and speculation that threatens to overwhelm what really matters--the art." - Vancouver Film Festival. UK, 2009, 95 mins.
Author, art critic and documentarian Ben Lewis studied art at Cambridge and in Berlin before joining MTV. He has directed films for the BBC, Arte and broadcasters in Europe, North America and Australia. These include THE KING OF COMMUNISM: THE POMP AND PAGEANTRY OF NICOLAE CEAUCESCU (2001), Baader-Meinhof: In Love with Terror (2002), BLOWING UP PARADISE (2005), HAMMER AND TICKLE: THE COMMUNIST JOKE BOOK (2006).
