But hey, I'm sure your work is fabulous!*
Fiona Macdonald's newest work, a moody, yet often hilarious, film entitled Museum Emotions, obsessively follows a little, self-absorbed world of artists, dealers, dancers, critics, and media. Characters couple and uncouple, careers are made and undone, generational rifts contract and expand, deals come together and fall apart. It's a soap opera with an exquisite sense of irony, at on and entertaining, a stimulating romp across themes of love and loss, of art and commerce, of brilliance and stupidity.
As in a soap opera, this film has a set of pathetic, loathsome characters - art stars, dealers, hangers on, as well as others on the fringe, desperate for the fame and money that the art scene can bestow, sometimes overnight. Think of an art world modeled on Melrose Place, an inspiration for this film. Underhanded scheming and death-even a hint of murder-shadow the emotional involvements of the characters. Amid all the social gossip, the endless posing, and positioning, something shady has happened to an artist named Billy. He's disappeared.
(Perhaps a reference to a character of Melrose Place?) His disappearance has suddenly catapulted another artist into the limelight. But, here's the thing: there's a witness. Amber, herself an artist and object of desire, knows what happened, and she's got it on tape. Think now of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, another televisual inspiration for this film.
You should make a video of yourself crying.
Played out against the austere spaces of galleries, artist studios and hipster bars, the narrative of Museum Emotions is fragmented into ten discrete episodes, each ten minutes in length. In a conversation I had with the artist, Macdonald explained... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline