Karina on SpoutBlog

If you hadn’t seen Con Artist,  Michael Sladek’s “docu-comedy” on 80s art star Mark Kostabi, but walked blindly into the theater in the middle of the film’s Q & A last Tuesday, you’d have a fair sense of the dynamic between filmmaker and subject. When asked to account for the film’s playful, comic tone, Sladek said, “I had no intention to make a serious film about the art world. I had no intention to make a documentary, frankly.” At this point, Kostabi, standing next to Sladek, turned his side to the crowd to whisper conspiratorially, apparently offering directions to the director. Sladek did his best to ignore them. “I prefer to make narratives, because I can control them.”

Sladek entered Kostabi’s world (and Kostabi World - the studio where dozens of assistants have for years conceived and executed Kostabi’s paintings, which are not quite synonymous with his art) years after his 80s heyday and 90s reversal of fortune. With steady income flowing in from sales of his art artifacts on the Italian auction circuit, by the mid-00s Kostabi refashioned his performative assault on the art market into a cable access and web-distributed game show called Title This (which I wrote about in 2007, accidentally angering its fans with my use of the word “himbo”). Con Artist mostly offers evidence that Kostabi has devolved into a sad joke in the context of the art world, but sad jokes are all the rage online and on low-rent TV. In positing Title This as Kostabi’s barely-noticed comeback gambit, it reveals the show’s birlliance as a kind of natural evolution of Kostabi’s schtick for the proverbial Internet Age. In paying art world figures, including critics, to title his paintings, Kostabi outsources the labor of meaning-making to those who’d do it after the fact anyway, and updates his performance of total detachment into a DIY episodic spectacle in the process.

The first half of Con Artist is heavy with talking head interviews with Kostabi’s current and former associates (he’s burned a lot of bridges, and old beefs are picked apart here meticulously). All of these are shot with their subject in the foreground and representations of what they do to make money in the background, with a gauzy scrim in the middle — the counterpoint to Kostabi’s ethos of commercial transparency. Once the stage is set, Sladek takes on more of verite approach, following Kostabi through a flirtation with his makeup artist and a trip to Italy involving the conception and production of a statue of the Pope. The more screen space given over to Kostabi, the more it becomes apparent that the subject is attempting to direct the film from the inside.

The limits of a documentary director’s control over his subject become more evident when the subject is someone like Kostabi, who has made a (not always successful) career out of a kind of roving theater in which he plays a money-mad hack with no relationship to the real. It’s not a one-man show: starting in school, when he’d provoke playground fights (which his brother admits, “I don’t know how much of that was real or staged — Mark was always known to be looking for publicity”) and continuing through career highlights like his televised and well-publicized altercation with Morton Downey Jr, Kostabi has always fed off a potentially hostile audience, with the help of bemused accomplices.

Con Artist spends plenty of time and energy on revealing how the con works, but it’s short on analysis of how the art works. And it does work Of course, on a primary level Kostabi’s talent lies in his performance of various roles: Mark Kostabi, Celebrity; Mark Kostabi, Marketer; Mark Kostabi, Slave Driver; etc. But the fact that he still continues to oversee and and assume the overhead for the production paintings, which still continue to sell, is almost quaint in this fameball era, where actually having a product to associate with one’s self-promotion is almost banal. The fact is, Kostabi’s work is interesting because his (synthetic, often obnoxious but also sort of infectious) personality seems to infect each object he signs as his own, even though he has virtually no hand in its making (several employees and friends testify in the film that they haven’t seen Kostabi paint in years; at one point, he produces the last canvas he actually worked on, and then subsequently destroys it). Kostabi’s work is manufactured in the most mechanical way possible by human hands that might as well be drones, and yet it carries an “aura” that is only his. His very existence is essentially a walking affront to Walter Benjamin.
It works better for Kostabi and Sladek’s project If there is no “there” behind the Kostabi persona — if they can play it off as though the thousands of buyers of his paintings are marks that have unwittingly fallen into the con — and it’s that contempt for those who buy what’s he’s selling that has turned Kostabi into one of the most hated men in a field that’s not exactly full of men of the people. In the film, he plays the “misunderstood” card, but it’s not his most convincing performance. Con Artist essentially positions itself as a movie for people too smart to buy Kostabi paintings, but who nonetheless have a soft spot for Kostabi himself — the kind of people who, even more so than buyers, keep Kostabi World running by propping up its namesake’s ego. For all that it entertains with its record of the making of irony as a commodity, it’s hard to not feel conned by Con Artist’s role in Mark Kostabi’s self-fulfilling prophecy.