Painters Painting

Uncharacteristically for de Antonio, this takes the form of a homage rather than a critique. An apparently non-evaluative selection of auspicious interviewees (long-time friends of the film-maker, we're told) holding forth on postwar American art and its fashionable New York heyday, in fact take their validity as spokespeople from the commercial terms of the art market, and the only analytical correlatives invoked are those of the contemporary critics, dealers and buyers who decreed their 'importance' in the first place. The interviews are almost conspiratorially cosy, although still mystificatory next to the colour shots of the paintings in question, and one is left grasping at anecdotal material to sustain interest. While fans of Rauschenberg, Stella, Johns, Koons, de Kooning, et al, might love it, it's a decided aberration in de Antonio's important oeuvre.