The Round-Up: Johnny Depp Does Modigliani, Labubu Mania, and a Weird Idea for the Venice Biennale

0:01That might be a way that the art market works, more to the taste of an emerging generation. That's super interesting. Yeah, she talks about it being a sort of reverse trajectory to artists like Takashi Murakami who gained the kind of institutional acclaim first.

0:21I'm Kate Brown and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

0:30we are back with our monthly roundup where we parse and analyze some of the biggest headlines turning heads in the art world and art industry it is the dog days of summer but the art industry doesn't really take a break there's been lots going on and we are going to crack into some of it today so as usual i'm joined by my co-host ben davis dialing in from new york hey ben how are you I'm great. Nice to talk to you. And we also have with us today our editor-in-chief, Naomi Rae, dialing in from London. It's exciting to have you back on, Naomi. Yeah, I'm really excited to be here. I love the chat cast, so very happy to get invited.

1:03We've got some good topics today. Today we're going to talk about Johnny Depp's new directorial endeavor, Modi, Three Days on the Wings of Madness, his second attempt at directing in 30 years. The film is a biographical drama based on the life of the artist Modigliani. Then we will discuss some rumblings around the U.S. pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which is set to take place next year. And I'm sorry in advance, we are going to talk about the LeBuboos, but we promise it's going to be interesting and full of new information. But first, as we're spread between three countries, I'd love to know what's been up in your respective places these days.

1:39What's been going on in London, Naomi? Well, I was very excited earlier this summer to bump into Arthur Jafa, who is a brilliant artist and responsible for what many people see as one of the most important works of this century. Love is the Message, the Message is Death. Sure. And he brought that to London earlier this month to a small project space in Croydon. And I was very interested to watch the film, you know, about a decade after it was originally released and to sort of kind of see how it lands in a new kind of political climate. Obviously, it was produced in 2016, kind of the tail end of the Obama years, right as kind of Trump's first presidency was coming into view.

2:28For readers or listeners who haven't seen the film, it's a kind of seven minute or seven and a half minute film. It's a kind of rapid fire montage of found footage from the Internet depicting these kind of uplifting moments of Black joy, but being kind of interspersed and knitted together with these kind of devastating images of Black death that was inundating our social media feeds at that time. And it felt very urgent and unflinching then. And I was really curious to watch it again in this kind of sort of post-George Floyd, post-Black Lives Matter, and as we're in a kind of even more alarming political moment.

3:10to sort of see how the work would land a second time. Sure. A work that was at the top of a lot of people's lists, like you said, of best works of the 2010s and really captured a moment. I do wonder, has it changed meaning over time? I think it's very famously set to a song by Kanye West, Ultralight Beam, which is just to say, you know, Kanye West's meaning has changed a lot in that intervening time. and I'm sure the film itself might have changed resonance. Did it hit different? It hit different. It definitely did. One of the things about the work is that it is very, very formally powerful. The very first time I saw it, I was in tears.

3:56I wasn't really expecting to be so emotionally kind of hit by it. And I was curious whether that would happen again. Jafa's spoken a lot about the reaction to the work. It was very critically acclaimed. A lot of people, you know, really emphasized how emotionally devastating it was and how it had made them cry. And he'd sort of been very critical of that. He's spoken about it in a lot of interviews and he calls it a microwave epiphany, that the implication is that it wasn't really a sufficient reaction, that people telling him that they cried at the work was not a measure of kind of productive or critical engagement with it.

4:35Yeah. I saw that work in 2018 at the Julia Stoschek collection. And Ben, we talked about on the episode about Aesthetic Chills Apex, another work by Arthur Jafa. And I think love is the message. The message is death has the same effect, like the power of juxtapositioning and what it does to you on like a physical level is really intense. And we should also mention, you know, the element of dance that is played in that and sort of rhythm, because I believe the work is on view alongside a famous work by Mark Leckie, right, Naomi? Yes, yes. Fiorucci made me hardcore. And absolutely, I think that that microwave epiphany, that's the term that Jafa gave to the formal kind of qualities of the work or whatever.

5:15I think that Aesthetic Chills and what Ben has written about Aesthetic Chills, it's describing kind of something very similar, like the formal qualities of how a work can kind of cause, you know, or can stir up an emotional reaction in people. I know what he means by a microwave epiphany in the sense, you know, like a fast, having a very profound experience in a very accelerated way. And there may be something inauthentic about it. But part of me thinks, isn't that what art does? It concentrates emotional energy into one space so you can experience emotions more intensely in a more concentrated, faster way.

5:53Yeah, absolutely. And that's what I've been thinking about, essentially, about kind of that reaction that I had initially. And then what Jafa said about how our tear is a productive measure of engagement with the work. And I think, well, when people say that it brought them to tears, that's a comment on the formal composition of the work. That's maybe the most emotionally resonance or kind of surface level reading, but doesn't mean it's the only kind of reaction that people had. Doesn't mean that that ability for the work to kind of speed up that emotional reaction didn't start, you know, a process of kind of critical self-reflection or spur people to action.

6:28And I think, you know, that context of the work, you know, being made in 2016 before, you know, the momentum that happened around Black Lives Matter in 2020, I guess you could say it's more accessible or it was able to communicate a very complicated message and an urgent political reality quite efficiently and quickly. And I think that's actually, you know, a great power of the work rather than, you know, necessarily a shortcoming. Indeed, it's a powerful work. I mean, we could spend a whole episode talking about these films. They're so deeply impactful. Ben, what about you? You were in New York right now, but you were just at Sight Santa Fe, I believe, right?

7:09Yeah, well, I've been on vacation and just got back last night. But I went out to the Southwest for Sight Santa Fe. I was moderating a panel with some curators who've curated that biennial over the years. It's 30 years old. It's the first international art biennial in the United States. Tachilia Alemani is a very famous curator, did the Venice Biennale, has done this 30th anniversary edition of Sight Santa Fe. It's called Once Within a Time and a very interesting show. I think people should check it out if they're out in Santa Fe. I guess in terms of things that came out of it, things that I think are interesting, The show is named Once Within a Time, which is the name of a film by the filmmaker Godfrey Reggio, who lives in Santa Fe.

8:01And if you know him, if people know him, it might be from his film Koyaanisqatsi from the 80s, which is a legendary abstract film about industrial society out of control. This is all just to say, my most interesting artistic moment of the last couple weeks is that I got to meet him when I was in Santa Fe. I got to go to his studio, and he is 85, I believe, and just, it's like meeting a wizard. He is amazing. His studio is full. The walls are covered with cutouts and notes from the research he's doing for his films. and I got to talk to him and he told me all about meeting Guy Debord in the past.

8:46And we talked about ideas and his art and what he's working on next. And I was enchanted by the experience. That's so cool. You know, Cecilia Limani, as you mentioned, curated the Venice Biennale a few years ago, which was widely acclaimed and most people loved it. Were there any continuities there? Because I know the site Santa Fe Biennial is quite locally specific. Well, it's gone through a whole process. We talked about this in the panel I did, that there is a whole evolution of biennials from being focused on cosmopolitanism and internationalism when it started back in the 90s. That was the theme of everything.

9:21And actually, one of the things I take away from the discussion I had on stage there is there's an interesting conversation in biennials that parallels the larger breakdown of ideas of cosmopolitanism in the political sphere where everybody's thinking more nationally and regionally. and it has been the case, that has been the case in biennials everywhere and including in Cecilia's where one of the innovations of this show is that there's art in it and then there are stories, like local stories where she focuses on people like the author Cormac McCarthy and just references like poetry he wrote or let's see, what's my favorite one?

10:03Oh, the author Willa Cather and you can see some of her drawings and there are other more local characters whose names I can't even remember, who are Santa Fe-based characters, who are just, their stories are spreaded throughout the show alongside art, which makes for an interesting experience that I'm still trying to think through whether that works for me. Do you think that's because the art has become less legible or less, I don't know, just thinking about what we were just talking about and kind of how a lot of political art almost feels like it has gotten further removed from being sort of legible and being aesthetic and maybe that somehow like that having a kind of formal or aesthetic quality somehow diminishes its moral value yeah i mean i think it has to do with different things but one of them is sort of opening people up, particularly contemporary art, it's sometimes there are these mysterious ways that artists make.

11:07They're making things in odd ways that aren't necessarily visual. So having those stories there of like local characters that people connect with, I think sort of signposts to a larger audience that keep your eyes open. This is about connecting with ways of living, which I think is a smart decision. How the best way to present it is, I don't know. Again, we should do a whole episode on this. But we have so much to talk about. Kate, I want to know what you've seen in Berlin before we really get into it. Yeah. Quickly, I guess to mention the Berlin Biennial, another big biennial that's on right now until September 14th.

11:44Oh, speaking of biennials. Yeah. Summer of biennials. It's called Passing the Fugitive On. Very unclear term. I don't know what it means after having seen the show, to be honest. But another story, conceived by curator Sasha Kola, who is Turin-based, but she is from Mumbai and she works with a lot of artists from Myanmar. So the show had a real political focus. It also talked a lot about different states' oppressions. And I think that's kind of where the trouble began for this Berlin Biennial, because given the recent cultural sector protests in Germany and controversies around censorship in Germany and also the activities of this group called Strike Germany, which is basically suggesting that artists should not work in Germany while Germany is supporting Israel.

12:37That the show didn't really meet the moment. That was what several critics said in some other publications. We have not published a review of the show yet, but that was kind of the general takeaway that they didn't really address this issue, which is going on in Germany right now. That said, I thought that the show had some really nice high points. There was a lot of discoveries, but I did feel like in general it was a little bit vague and it came across like a bit of a whisper. There was this whole element of humor that was supposed to play out, which I was quite excited about, but I didn't really quite feel it as much as I wish I had.

13:18It comes at a very vexed time in the German cultural sphere. And so I think it let a lot of people down on multiple fronts. Wow. Talk about stuff that we could have a whole episode about. Certainly. Certainly. Yeah. Yeah, but we should get into arguably something quite a lot later, which is we had some homework to watch the new Johnny Depp film, Modi. Naomi, do you want to run us through the idea behind this film and maybe the plot before we get into our views on it? Sure, sure. So we're going to talk about Johnny Depp's, what is it, the second film he's directed in 20 years or something like that, which just released this month.

13:56And it's a biopic of Amadeo Modigliani, although not very informative as far as biopics go. There's a lot of rich kind of detail in Modigliani's life that could have been drawn on and that has made many films. but rather than kind of looking at some of those biographic details, I mean, he died at 35 of tuberculosis and his lover subsequently killed herself while she was eight months pregnant with his second child. There's a ton, you know, that it could have gone into, but it doesn't go there at all. It looks at kind of 72 hours in the life of this artist and it's kind of a romantic, I I might say shallow portrait of a kind of bohemian artist in 20th century Paris.

14:42It kind of depicts Modigliani as an impulsive, maybe self-destructive man. He dabbles in drugs and sex and turns down an offer of lots of money from an important collector out of kind of romantic principle, burns down his studio, and it's a real kind of caricature of that passionate, uncontrollable, starving artist. ultimately maybe a little self-indulgent. I gave you that homework and it's a two-hour film. Sure. Yeah. Kate, what did you think about it? You know, I'd received some prior warning from Naomi, but also our colleague Min wrote a review of it on Artnet, which I would recommend everyone reads.

15:22So it wasn't like going in with the highest expectations. I did learn some things, you know, this ragtag gang of outsiders hanging around Mont Parnasse. I didn't really know the full story of Modigliani and Chaim Soutine, who is an artist who I'm a big fan of that was, you know, active around Paris at that time. Kind of hard done by, though, Soutine. You know, provides a little bit of comic relief in the film. Oh my God. Soutine is so badly treated. I can't with actors putting on Eastern European accents poorly. They really made a caricature out of him, which is really too bad because he's a fantastic artist and he felt just kind of like the clown of the movie, you know?

16:00Totally. For people who have not seen this movie or will not see it, there is a scene where Soutine literally has a dead fly living on his face or embedded in his face. It is so gross. And it's like living with a cockroach. I don't know. It's very unpleasant in a way. As Naomi said, there's so much that this film could have done. It was based on a play as well. but it just felt like a sort of pastiche of a bunch of separate scenes. There was no overarching vision of what this film was trying to say about this artist, what his real drive was to make his art or what even Haim Soutin's was. So it sort of just felt like a pieced together group of episodes.

16:43Do you know what I mean? Yeah, even formally, I think Min wrote this in her review about the tone, which is kind of all over the place. It's a bit clumsy. There's sort of this kind of slapstick moments and this comic relief and then some random silent film interlude and these meandering kind of flashbacks to his childhood. And then like a Tom Waits song comes in. Yeah, the music, the music. It smacks of a director who is excited to make a film and wants to try out all these things that he's clearly been thinking about over the span of his acting career. As you said, like black and white interludes and all these great songs that I have on vinyl probably.

17:23It just felt like everything was rammed in there and you kind of have to pick a tone. That's why it felt like episodes almost. And although the movie is about Modigliani, it is dedicated to Jeff Beck, the guitarist, who Johnny Depp is friends with, they've gone on tour with. So the film is really sort of a tribute to the creative spirit or Johnny Depp's perception of what the creative spirit should be. And my reaction to the film is that it is not really a film meant to be watched by the general public. it's more of a coded text to Johnny Depp fans is how I read it. It's put out by his production company.

18:13It comes out of the whole story where Al Pacino wanted to make a film out of this. There's actually another Modigliani film that spun off from the same play. There's a very specific vision that's been in the works for a long time that Depp finally, post-controversy, you know, post a decade of controversy, which includes the infamous Depp Hurd spousal abuse, libel case, and also his own overspending. Like I went back and read the 2019 Rolling Stone review of him that is infamous in terms of it just depicts him living this extravagant lifestyle. really talks about his belief in himself as a creative genius who is living this passionate life and will not compromise with anything and constantly doing drugs and drinking.

19:07He brags about spending more than$30 ,000 a month on wine in that profile, which is very dark considering all the accusations of abuse that happened during the Depard trial. So I really just view this film in so many ways as basically a coded text to his fans saying, like, this is how I think about creativity. It's this free spirited thing where you love and enjoy without constraints. And if you break through a stained glass window and offend people and act bad, that's all just what it's about being an artist. Right. I think you're spot on, Ben, with that reading of the film. I also think rather than it being a portrait of Meditliani, it's a portrait of Johnny Depp himself.

19:58And I attended a screening of this film in London at Tate Modern. Yeah, yeah. Tell us about that. Well, Johnny Depp was on a panel discussion afterwards and he gave some further insight into this film. The panel was titled The Universal Plight of the Artist. Oh, boy. Okay, there you go. There you go. That sums it up. Indeed. So, I mean, it was overall very smug and kind of self-congratulatory. It was moderated by the Sunday Times art critic Waldemar Jankuzic. He's a kind of greasy character himself. And Depp is, in the beginning, he quoted Dr. Johnson via Hunter S. Thompson. It's the first line of fear and loathing in Las Vegas, which is, he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

20:44After which, he did feel the need to specify to the audience that this is about humanity and it's not just about men, which I think, you know. Well, yes, he's become sort of the Pied Piper or an icon of the post-Me Too moment, right? So I suppose that's a very important note on his part. We're slamming this thing pretty hard. I do want to say that the acting was in some moments really great. Bruno Gorey, who played Maurice Utrillo, who was a painter in Paris at that time, who was also in White Lotus and Emily in Paris, I thought was really good. I thought Stephen Graham, who was in Snatch, who plays the art dealer, Leopold Zaborski, was good.

21:19But again, I just feel like they weren't given the right lines to really bring some of the story to life. I mean, Al Pacino was also very good. I think he brought a real presence to Maurice Gagnon. Hard disagree. Oh, well, I thought that was the best scene in the film. Him and Beatrice Hastings. I would disagree about Utrio, but that's because I just really couldn't see around the Emily in Paris thing. And it made me think that this whole film was like an episode of Emily in Paris. Oh, yeah, exactly. They're like caricatures of free-spirited artists where they're like sprawled out on the street and peeing in the corner.

21:56There's a long scene where they argue over whether to release a cockroach. And he's like, the cockroach, it is you. It is you. That's a bug free. And it's so, I mean, I think the whole thing's cringe. This was originally an Al Pacino project. He handed it off. They talked about this when they were filming Donnie Brasco. And he handed it off to Depp, apparently is still a supporter, and has been a subject, I believe, of Depp's own art, which we can talk about in a moment. Yeah, I just thought the scene itself is the best scene in the movie and gives you one of the few real-feeling things about it, which is that Modigliani did consider himself a sculptor and only a painter by default.

22:35And that's sort of the substance of that scene where he's trying to sell his paintings. The collector's like, these are no good, but I will give you all this money for this sculpture. And he's, that's too precious to me. I refuse it. But I just thought Al Pacino's accent was not good. Very late stage Al Pacino kind of performance for me. Ben, you mentioned Johnny Depp's art as part of, you know, maybe part of a wider Johnny Depp rebrand that we're all witnessing. Naomi, do you want to quickly run us through what was going on with this, with this drop? Well, the drop, I mean, it's, again, I think that Johnny Depp is doing reputation management of some sort.

23:11He's rebranding himself as this visionary artist. And I guess, you know, all of that, his past becomes part of that image, right? I mean, the recent drop was actually a drop of prints, I think, of artwork that he made, you know, in, I guess, a quieter time of his life when he was with his family and his daughter. some of his comments about the work were a little strange. He kind of talks about this kind of idyllic time in his life and how great it was to be a dad as if he's no longer a dad. But before that, right on the heels of the Dap Heard trial, like literally the month afterwards, he sold$3 million.

23:49I don't remember if it was$3 million or£3 million of art prints from his Heroes series, which is like images of people he considers creative inspirations like Hunter S. Thompson and Bob Marley. And these are truly bad. There was such a Depp fandom. I went back and watched the Depp v. Heard documentary last night in preparation for this, doing my homework. And, you know, I forgot just how maniacal the fandom about him of people who were Johnny's been wronged and I'm going to support him. And he immediately was able to turn that into money with this series of what you have to say are very bad paintings.

24:25He's a collector of both Warhol and Basquiat, and these, they look like the bad late period Warhol celebrity portraits where there's a silkscreened image of a celebrity and then some light detailing texturing on it. I mean, that's what it is. And I just say all that because I think it reflects back into the movie that like the idea of art. You can see these videos he does about these art prints where he's like, this is I'm so passionate about this amazing art. I'm doing all this stuff. And you look at me like that's that's the art you're so passionate about. Like, what is the passion here? And then the film, too, has this idea of the artist, and it all just feels so stock and cliche and empty and frayed around the edges.

25:14He really wants to be taken seriously, though, as an artist. I feel like when he's speaking and he's trying here, you can tell that he's got this desperation to get this approval of the art world and kind of critical attention of all of these people he sees himself in a lineage of. As does Adrian Brody, but maybe they're friends. But we should move on from, you know, one blockbuster arguably to another. The State Department's deadline for submissions has passed. If you are an artist who wanted to make art for the Venice Biennial U.S. Pavilion next year, you can no longer submit. However, we do have some stories around this.

25:51Ben, do you want to walk us through what's been going on with the U.S. Pavilion? well the long and the short answer of it is that no one knows what's going on the venice biennale who people have heard us blab about the venice biennale a lot it's the olympics of the art world it's the biggest art show in the world happens once every two years it's very important which artist goes for which country and because of the entire nature of the trump to administration's relationship to culture, what's going to happen has been a little bit up in the air, partly because it's not clear who wants to represent the U.S.

26:33at this particular moment when, you know, Trump is pulling out of UNESCO and so on and banning DEI programs. They've released new guidelines, actually, for the Venice Biennale, saying that the most important thing is that the pavilion not promote DEI in any way. There's also a new mandate that anybody who does the pavilion for the U.S. in Venice will be monitored constantly by the State Department to make sure that they can live up to the challenge. Even though they released the guidelines late, there's been reporting about how It's not even clear logistically how possible it is to get everything together, all the funding and the art and the logistics together between September 1st when they'll announce it and April of next year when the show happens.