Welcome to Art Angle, an Artnet News podcast that dives into the places where the art world meets the real world, bringing each week’s biggest story to earth. Join us each week for an in-depth look at what matters most in museums, the art market and more, with input from our own writers and editors, as well as artists, curators and diners. other leading experts in the field.
In a new feature film titled Inside, an art theft goes horribly wrong for a thief named Nemo.
Nemo is played by world-renowned actor Willem DaFoe, already beloved in the art world for his performance in the 2018 film At the door of eternitywhere he played Vincent van Gogh.
In Inside’s ultra-contemporary plot, Dafoe’s character, Nemo, isn’t a world-famous artist, he’s a rather anonymous thief chasing a self-portrait by Egon Schiele. The artwork isn’t where it’s supposed to be inside the ultra-modern penthouse he just walked into. Carefully laid plans seem to go awry. Precious minutes are wasted. Then, the alarm system locks out, leaving Nemo isolated from the world as he finds himself in midtown Manhattan. If you haven’t seen Inside yet, be aware that there are spoilers scattered throughout this episode.
So Nemo is now stuck in a resplendent box of glass, steel, and concrete, complete with little more than exotic fish, fancy furniture, and a multimillion-dollar art collection. On screen alone for virtually the entire film, DaFoe’s character begins to struggle with the degradation of his body and mind – to deal with the latter, the artwork in the apartment becomes something like a central character, just like the flourishing creativity of Nemo.
The apartment’s artwork, which has been carefully curated, directs the plot and deepens the themes. There’s a 1999 work by Maurizio Cattelan, a large photograph of a man taped to the wall with tons of tape, sarcastically titled a perfect day. There’s also David Horvitz’s 2019 neon looming over the character’s fight, with a sort of torturous prescience: it says “Any time after this moment.” To build the idea of a true art collection, there are more emerging stars. The work of Kosovar artists Petrit Halilaj and Shkurte Halilaj for the 2017 Venice Biennale is worn by Nemo when the temperature in the penthouse drops. And a video work by Julian Charrière and Julius von Bismarck from 2016, which was filmed in the exclusion zone surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, is among the artwork in the film that evokes questions about humanity, planetary survival and the climate crisis. an underlying theme of the film.
In this week’s episode, European editor Kate Brown talks to the film’s director Vasilis Katsoupis and art curator Leonardo Bigazzi about this gripping and claustrophobic feature film, which made its world premiere at the film from Berlin last month and is set to hit theaters in the United States. .
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