"Committing Masterpieces"

Wells’ F for Fake seems to nicely embody several of concepts offered in this and in previous week’s readings. Most notably for me is the film’s tie to Foucault’s essay, and especially his ruminations on what constitutes an author’s “work”. Much of the film focused on the economic factors at play in lives and stories of the subjects of the documentary (Elmyr, Irving, Oja, Wells himself), which seemed to me—maybe only because I watched it for the first time after reading Foucault, Jameson, Adorno, et. al.—to highlight the relative superficiality of what constitutes an author/auteur/artist’s work and, more importantly, how that work is (financially) valued. Later in the film, Emyr tells us of Picasso’s unequaled ability* to take “10 seconds work” and turn it into “gold”. Indeed, Picasso and revered artists like him are paradigms for Foucault’s argument for the existence of complex systems that are constructed and surround the signifiers understood as authors (or artists in this case). Picasso, in my opinion, did have tremendous artist talent and skill, but was it more so than other artists—Van Gogh to take another well-known name—who never achieved commercial success? Switching medium, Wells’ own story in the film speaks similarly to the constructing of a commodified persona to infuse works of art and to drive their marketability. In some of these cases of the auteur then, the commodification of a specific filmic style and its signification with a director’s proper name could be viewed as simply a sister-method of categorization to the various genres; we go to see a film by Wells, Hitchcock, Fellini, Truffaut, Spielberg, Burton, etc. because we are familiar with their filmic style and/or their particular branded mode of storytelling in much the same way as we go to see a romance, comedy, or horror film because we are familiar with their formulaic narrative content. I think an argument could be made that the commercial success of some auteurs such as Hitchcock and Spielberg (if he is in the category) indicates if nothing else their ability to tell highly evocative and affective narratives in film. But this view assumes a viewer response uninfluenced by the culture industry…


*ability is certainly a problematic word choice since—meaning no disrespect or implicit valuating statement to/on Picasso’s work—the point I am making here concerns the relative superficiality with which one is able to make their work valuable in commodity culture.