Art in the movies: The art of more

Change out the raucous music business  for art and white folk and dah dah - the TV series Empire becomes The art of more. Centered on the battles between two auction houses not a million miles away from Sotheby’s (Parke-Mason) and Christie’s (DeGraaf's), The art of more presents an eclectic range of collectables (cars, space junk and sports memorabilia). Fortunately for OTN art is certainly the lead husky when it comes to cash accumulation. The series producers Chuck Rose and Gardner Stern didn't see the need for an art consultant on the team as they knew themselves what was going on and good for them as it certainly makes the series more fun. A (spoiler alert) faked van Gogh (an odd mix of The starry night, an olive tree painting and some general landscape stuff) easily fools the experts at both Parke-Mason and DeGraaf's as well along with all the other ‘experts’ who inspect it before auction. Well-known paintings from the Met go under that hammer and there's also a contemporary art auction where it gets a little wild. Jeff Koons’s Rabbit is recast as a painting and a stuffed deer in a bath (death-of-Marat-style) takes centre stage. The deer inspires the best art insight of the show when a core cast member explains, 'The artist is saying that it’s a privilege for the deer to die on its own terms and not on the terms of the humans that turned its habitat into concrete and acid rain. That it’s suicide is power.' Dead on.

Images: top to bottom, the fake van Gogh, the Met helps out with auction fodder and conversation with a dead deer