Wallcreeping

Colleen Kelsey on looking for works of art in works of fiction. This article originally ran in March 2023.

Of all the acknowledgements listed in the “Special Thanks” credits of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), it’s not the invocation of long-lost ‘80s Manhattan fashion mecca Charivari, or the Florentine suppliers of Michael Douglas’s bullish spread-collar striped shirts and power-clashing ties, that hold my attention. Rather, it’s the flashy litany of real-world art galleries and artists tallied up, Tony Shafrazi and Julian Schnabel among them, that confirm the “I Spy”-style party game I’ve been playing while watching the film. 

The lurid finance fable, released scant months after Black Monday, is overloaded with of-the-era consumerist allusions, art being one of the most amusing. Douglas’s Gordon Gekko, the craven “money never sleeps” financier, flexes his sizeable collection often, most memorably in a monologue to his new protégé, Bud (Charlie Sheen) about an imposing black-and-green Joan Miró abstraction lording over a Picasso and a pair of Jean Dubuffet paintings in his office. He offers up one of his typically lizardy bons mots: “This painting here, I bought it 10 years ago for $60,000. I could sell it today for $600,000. The illusion has become real,” a lesson on the most slippery commodity of all—potential. 

Other pieces in the film read as gags of the decade’s market hubris, archetypal examples of “trophy art,” a category that Daniel Riley so adroitly explains in his recent GQ profile of Jeff Koons. Bud and his Krizia-swaddled interior designer girlfriend, played by Daryl Hannah, break up in front of a Schnabel plate painting in the grotesquely-appointed, postmodern-style penthouse she decorated. He’s angry enough to throw a liquor bottle at a wall-mounted Keith Haring face sculpture; off-camera is a nightmarish Lucas Samaras oil of a succession of grinning skulls. The “John Chamberlain” smashed steel wall sculptures at Gekko’s Hamptons compound seem to be faked for the movie, though they register as intended, but a George Condo, fleetingly glimpsed in another scene, is the real deal: lent by Schnabel from his personal collection.

The party game I mentioned has become a bit of an obsession, a cinematic parallel to the “Art in the Background” Instagrams posted by White Columns director Matthew Higgs, who catalogs the Glenn Ligons and Sol Lewitts hanging behind the celebrities and talking heads he sees while watching cable news. One of the most curious, from last summer, was a Rob Pruitt panda painting owned by former senior Trump advisor Eric Herschmann, spotted during his testimony at the January 6th hearings. I could not tell you if Herschmann, who is currently representing former Green Bay Packer Brett Favre in a welfare fraud scheme, is aware of the commonalities between his home decor and Sam Taylor-Johnson’s limp 2015 adaptation of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey: Another painting from this Pruitt series appears in Christian’s office.

In the movies and on TV, art often takes the role of a background actor, fading into the larger production design. But it can muscle its way into a supporting or even a starring role, offering oblique readings of our characters's psychological preoccupations or material interests, and serving as a representation of taste—whether it’s the high-gloss Thierry Le Gouès nudes owned by DMX’s gangster in Hype Williams’ Belly (1998), Miranda Priestly's hallway Alex Katz, or Bert Cooper’s much-gossiped-about Mark Rothko. We often see where our protagonists live, what they wear, and who they’re sleeping with, but what about what they find beautiful, haunting, possessing? Or, more cynically, what have they deemed to be a good investment?

ACROSS THE DIRTYVERSE